


i practiced falling off buildings and out windows

by daisysusan



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Angst, Foursome - M/M/M/M, M/M, Multi, Romance, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 02:27:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisysusan/pseuds/daisysusan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever prepared Dustin for the idea that he might fall in love with all of his best friends. At the same time. For polybigbang on LJ.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i practiced falling off buildings and out windows

Dustin really can’t emphasize enough how much he did _not_ anticipate this. Like, at literally no point in his life did he think he would ever end up in a situation even remotely resembling this one. 

Not that he’s _complaining_ , as such. 

He’s really, _really_ not complaining. 

His head is curled against Mark’s shoulder, and someone’s fingers are trailing sleepily up and down his spine and—well, unexpected and bad aren’t the same thing in the least. And frankly, Dustin would rather press a sleepy kiss to the side of Mark’s neck, let Chris whisper in his ear, and fall asleep. 

 

\--

 

It starts when Chris doesn’t come back from Chicago.

Dustin’s not entirely sure why he expected him to, other than that life without Chris just wasn’t something he ever wanted. But the fact remains that Chris doesn’t come back. 

He goes to New York with his boyfriend, whose name is Curtis or Sam or something equally stupid that Dustin hasn’t even bothered to memorize. He dislikes all of Chris’s boyfriends, kind of on principle. It’s not like any of them are good enough for him, anyway. 

And he’s jealous.

There’s that too.

Dustin is man enough to admit that he’s in love with his best friend, just like he’s man enough to wear pink, or get drunk and sing karaoke, or cry, or any number of other activities in which he occasionally engages and which serve only to reinforce his masculinity. 

Like staying up until four in the morning playing video games and drinking shitty beer with Mark, even though they’re both so fucking rich they could get wasted off top-shelf vodka. 

And leaning over, still half-drunk, to press a sloppy kiss to Mark’s cheek—one that misses spectacularly when Mark learns toward him and starts to ask something (presumably, what he’s doing). 

Shortly thereafter, Dustin realizes that, for two people who didn’t really expect to end up with their lips touching at all, they’re not exactly making an effort to pull away, either. If anything, Mark’s moving his mouth gently, almost imperceptibly against Dustin’s, and his hand is ghosting across Dustin’s knee. It’s warm and nice and Dustin hasn’t been kissed in an embarrassingly long time—as it turns out, neither being CTO of an enormous social networking site nor his own start-up is especially conducive to, well, _dating_ —and Mark’s lips are soft but persistent against his and okay, fuck it, Dustin’s going to kiss him back. 

He’s too drunk and tired and fucking lonely to care about the possible downsides of making out with his—not the best friend he’s ever had, but the best functional friendship he has right now, definitely. Whatever. 

Dustin opens his mouth just slightly and feels Mark respond. It’s a little sloppy, neither of them properly awake or properly sober, but it’s an oddly comfortable kiss. 

Kind of like their friendship, he thinks stupidly. It shouldn’t work at all, but here they are, drinking and hanging out and, okay, yeah, kissing. Dustin’s not particularly inclined to stop, because—because a lot of things. 

He curls a hand around the back of Mark’s neck and pulls him a little closer, turning it into a proper kiss with lips and tongues and—did Mark just drag his teeth over Dustin’s lower lip? Cause he would be okay with that happening again. In reply, Dustin drags Mark closer, nearly into his lap, and pulls their mouths apart so that he can press a line of messy kisses down the side of his neck. 

Mark’s skin tastes kind of like it smells, of sweat and the office and drugstore bodywash. (It’s not what Dustin thinks Chris would taste like; he would probably be cleanliness and soap and the sting of aftershave.)

When Mark finally pulls away, eyes wide, he doesn’t say anything. The silence is thick around them, as each of them is too drunk to process what just happened but too sober to just ramble at each other. 

Finally, Dustin manages to wrap his brain around words. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?” he says, kind of wishing he could just dissolve into the sofa or turn invisible or be diliss—disli—whatever the thing from Harry Potter is. Basically he wishes that Mark wasn’t just staring at him, looking like he hasn’t processed anything since they broke apart and making Dustin feel _distinctly_ uncomfortable. 

“Yeah,” Mark says slowly, when the question has lingered unanswered for so long that Dustin is legitimately considering just suffocating himself with the sofa cushions to escape. “We can talk tomorrow.” 

“Can I crash here?” Dustin asks, really acutely aware that he’s nowhere close to sober enough to be driving—he just made out with Mark, for fuck’s sake. 

Mark doesn’t dignify that with a response, which Dustin kind of deserves, considering how many times he’s just passed out—more often from exhaustion than from alcohol, recently—on the couch without even bothering to ask first. He just picks up the throw wadded in a chair and tosses it at Dustin, who lets it hit him in the head and drape over him, too lazy to move. 

He hears a soft exhale that sounds almost like laughter, and then padding footsteps fading as they ascend the stairs. Eventually, he finds the willpower to pull the throw off his head and stretch out on the couch, not even bothering to look around for a pillow before he falls asleep. 

 

Dustin wakes some—not nearly enough—hours later to the disturbingly familiar sound of Mark fighting with a coffee maker he uses almost only when Dustin is there. Like the crazy person he so clearly is, Mark prefers waking up early and copious amounts of red bull to sleeping in and drinking coffee _even when he’s hungover_. 

Granted, neither of them couple possibly be very hungover, but Dustin’s still a little bitter at being roused before noon. 

“Mark,” he grouses, his throat too fuzzy to actually yell. 

“What?” Mark snaps from the kitchen. 

“Why are you making noise this early?” Dustin says, briefly considering the idea of sitting up before dismissing it as requiring entirely too much effort. 

“I’m making you coffee, asshole,” Mark replies. Dustin rolls his eyes; he would gladly have suffered through a red bull if it meant getting to sleep for another couple hours. Instead of answering Mark, he just yanks the blanket up over his head and tries to go back to sleep. 

Of course, Mark’s kind of a dick, so that doesn’t prove very effective. 

Within moments of Dustin having _nearly_ dozed off, he feels Mark prodding at his shoulder. “I know you’re awake,” he says. Dustin tries to ignore him for a few moments, but it’s horribly ineffective. Mark has an absolutely terrifying ability to function like a real person—well, as much as he ever functions like a real person—on very little sleep. It’s kind of disgusting, really. 

After enduring the poking for a few moments, Dustin pulls the blanket off his head and grumbles “I was asleep until you started _physically assaulting me_.”

Mark just rolls his eyes. “Don’t be such a wuss.”

“We aren’t all robots who can live our robot lives without sleep, you know.” Dustin manages to arrange himself in rough approximation of a seated position while he’s talking, but actually feeling alive is probably a few cups of coffee away at best. 

Mark flops down in the chair to Dustin’s right and grabs his—a—laptop off the coffee table. Dustin drowses and drinks the coffee slowly, watching Mark work, and neither of them says anything about having kissed the night before. After a good while—his whole cup of coffee and some pointless sitting after that—he stands up to leave. 

“I should go home,” he announces, because Mark’s too buried in his computer to notice anything else going on without it being pointed out to him. 

“What?” Mark says, sounding dazed. “You don’t need to go.”

Dustin just stares at him, slightly dumbfounded. 

“I do actually have my own place to live, you know. There are houseplants and everything.” 

Mark snickers a little, the noise closer to a giggle than Dustin thinks he would admit. (It’s cute, though.)

In response, Dustin scowls a little bit. “Maybe I’ll get a fish. I could keep a fish alive.”

“ _Please_ ,” Mark says, and Dustin reluctantly concedes—at least, to himself—that he probably couldn’t actually keep a fish alive. But he doesn’t plan on ever mentioning that to Mark. 

“See you on Monday,” he says instead. 

Once Dustin’s climbed into his car and pulled out of the driveway, he vaguely remembered telling Mark they’d talk about the whole _kissing_ thing today, but the idea of turning around and driving back and going inside and _talking to Mark_ seems difficult in a way that their friendship hasn’t ever been before. Everything’s been good with them for a while now, in a way it wasn’t when they were at Harvard and it definitely wasn’t after the dilution and all the anger and mistrust. But that’s somehow faded into comfort and companionship and Mark’s probably the best friend Dustin has these days.

Maybe he should just wait and see if Mark brings it up. 

 

After another couple cups of coffee—and a reasonably long nap—Dustin is in touch with reality enough to admit that Mark is _never_ going to bring it up. After all, he saw the way Mark looked at Eduardo, and he has it on good authority (Eduardo’s, that is, via Chris) that Mark never brought that up. 

And that was _Eduardo_. 

So Dustin’s choice is really a lot more like choosing between just never having it mentioned again and actually bringing it up himself, which isn’t particularly pleasant. 

Price he pays for making out with Mark Zuckerberg the emotionally constipated, he supposes. 

It’s kind of strange for him to realize how reluctant he is to bring it up—and not just with Mark, with anyone—because three years ago he would’ve just chugged a bit of beer and tugged at Mark’s hoodie until he looked up from his computer, then just asked it point-blank, _so, we made out last night. What happens now?_

It’s not quite such an easy thing to pull off as it would have been when he was eighteen and didn’t know what it looks like to watch your best friends pine away for each other and then screw it up so horribly that it’ll be a miracle if they ever speak to each other again. He’s wary now, he knows what’s at stake. 

He only put it off for a little while, just a couple days, really. He waits until they both actually have time to sit down and look at each other (Chris would be proud of him for that, he thinks), and he waits until after they’ve ordered their food at the restaurant he dragged Mark to against his will, and then Dustin looks him square in the eye and says, “So, last weekend we kissed.”

Mark seems a little taken aback, like it didn’t really occur to him that Dustin might want to talk about _that_. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Um.” Dustin swallows and hopes desperately that Mark will continue talking, because he has no idea where he wants to take the conversation from there _at all_. When, after a lingering and painfully awkward silence, it becomes clear that he’s not going to, Dustin speaks. 

“So…” he opens, letting the word trail off. 

“What do you want me to say?” Mark finally snaps. “It couldn’t possibly be more obvious that you want me to say _something_ but I have no idea what! Will you just spit it the fuck out?”

Dustin chokes on his water a little; Mark doesn’t get visibly, openly angry very often. He coughs a few times before he manages to say anything. “I don’t know either!”

In the ensuing—slightly less uncomfortable—silence, Mark bites his lip. “Is this a date?” he asks. 

“ _What_?” Dustin spits out. “ _No_!” He runs his palms up and down the legs of his jeans, suddenly a little uncomfortable with the vehemence of his objection. What if Mark actually wanted it to be a date? That could screw everything up, and then Dustin wouldn’t have anyone left. 

“Okay, good,” Mark says, and Dustin can breathe again. “We should just pretend it never happened,” he continues. 

Dustin grins, and says, “What happened?”

 

It actually works, too. Dustin doesn’t think about kissing Mark and—as far as he knows—Mark doesn’t think about kissing him, either. They both go about their lives (which, for Dustin, means facebook half the time and spending the other half of his life trying to make a crazy idea into something that’s actual functional). 

So, yeah, he’s a little too busy to be thinking about _anything_ other than work very often. 

But they really do manage to go about a week and a half without any fallout from their makeout session. 

And then it’s Thursday night at facebook, and they’ve successfully rolled out an update, which means relaxation and beer (for a little while, at least). Dustin leans against the wall and watches his employees—most of them older than he is—as they drink and socialize and he feels so much older than they are. He’s been here so much longer, since it was just a dream in their suite and him and Mark staying up all night coding and sheer panic at every change they made to the site. Back then, they didn’t need beer at their update celebrations, because the sheer joy of having pulled it off was enough to make them drunk with happiness—especially when their exhaustion was factored in.

Dustin’s also watching Mark from across the room. Mark’s sitting at a desk that’s not his, drinking a beer slowly and tapping away at the computer. It’s a picture Dustin’s seen countless times, achingly familiar and painfully lonely. The problem is that he remembers when there used to be someone who would—who could—drag Mark away from that, and the fact is that he’s nowhere near as good at that as Eduardo was (or even as good as Chris was). 

He misses Eduardo. Not as much as he misses Chris, because missing Chris is something he does like breathing—all the time, and he notices when it’s not happening—but he does miss Eduardo’s stupid suits and stupid hair and stupid, _stupid_ smiley affection for all of them. 

It’s just—things work better with Eduardo around. He smoothes down the rough edges; he makes Mark sleep and stands in the middle when Chris and Mark butt heads, each too stubborn to concede an inch to the other. Things are just less cohesive without him.

Thinking about Eduardo is easier than thinking about Chris. 

A touch against his arm startles him. Not that it’s a bad thing—letting his thoughts get too caught up in Chris tends to lead to unfortunate things, like consuming lots of alcohol and making phone calls he regrets in the morning. 

Mark’s standing next to him, holding a beer and watching the floor intently. Dustin doesn’t say anything, and in lieu of speaking, Mark just drains his bottle and sets it on the desk next to them. 

He turns to look at Dustin, still not saying anything, and then leans over and kisses him quickly. 

No one’s paying attention to them; they’re in a reasonably secluded corner and the festivities in the middle of the fishbowl are far more interesting. The kiss is the exact opposite of what Dustin was expecting, mostly because he didn’t expect Mark to do anything even _resembling_ kissing, and he finds himself just staring at Mark stupidly for a moment. 

But he doesn’t actually protest, or object, or in any other way indicate that he had a _problem_ with it, so he’s marginally less surprised when Mark grabs his wrist, pulls him into the hallway that leads to the bathrooms, and presses him against the wall with a significantly more intense kiss. 

And, okay, it’s pretty nice. 

Well “nice” might be understating the matter rather significantly. 

Because Mark is pushing him hard against the wall and licking into his mouth and wrapping a hand around the back of his neck to drag their faces even closer—which Dustin didn’t really think was possible but okay—and Dustin’s got his arms around Mark’s back and, well, one of his hands might be under Mark’s shirt. 

That’s a definitely possibility. 

Not that Mark seems to be complaining, as he has the hand that isn’t curling into the hair at Dustin’s nape trailing up his side under his t-shirt and then he’s scraping his fingernails lightly down Dustin’s spine and _oh god_ Dustin has no idea what’s happening but he doesn’t particularly want to stop. It’s easy to let his tongue play against Mark’s and tighten his arms so that their hips press together—Mark makes a slightly choked noise that’s so much hotter than it has any right to be that Dustin’s pretty sure his brain shorts out a little bit. 

Mark responds by grabbing Dustin’s ass and grinding against him. 

Apparently they’re going to do this. 

_Wait_ , says a tiny voice in the back of Dustin’s mind—probably tiny because of how much of him is focused on dragging his lips and tongue along Mark’s jaw— _do you really want to have sex in a hall where anyone can walk past you?_

(The voice sounds a little like Chris, but he’s too distracted to analyze that as well as he probably should.)

Dustin pushes Mark away from him just enough to get the leverage he needs to haul him into the men’s bathroom and slam him against the inside door of the closest stall. He seals their mouths back together, pulling a little at Mark’s lower lip with his teeth. The noise Mark makes is—well, Dustin doesn’t really know what to do with that except roll his hips and try to get him to make it again. 

Then—this is where Dustin kind of loses his ability to think coherently—Mark’s somehow gotten the upper hand and Dustin has his back against the side of the stall and Mark’s on his knees and _Jesus fucking Christ what is happening_. 

Mark fiddles with Dustin’s belt for a moment before he actually gets it undone and he’s clearly making a point of letting his hands drag across the front of Dustin’s jeans as much as possible, which isn’t _at all_ driving Dustin _out of his fucking mind_. 

Dustin hisses when Mark presses his palm against his cock, and when he feels Mark unzipping his pants and blowing a quick stream of air against the wet spot in his boxers, his head falls back against the stall loudly. He imagines that Mark is smirking a little at that, but then again he might not be, if only because he’s mouthing along Dustin’s cock and pinning Dustin’s hips against the metal behind him. 

For all that it’s obvious what this is leading to, Dustin is completely unprepared when Mark finally pulls his boxers down and runs his tongue up the vein under his dick. 

And then Mark basically swallows him down and Dustin forgets how to breathe for a moment. His eyes are squeezed shut and one hand is resting on the top of Mark’s head and Mark is just—going at it. 

It’s probably the hottest thing that has ever happened to Dustin. 

He’s breathing hard and Mark is making noises that sound like fucking moans around his dick and it’s taking every ounce of focus he has—which really isn’t much—to keep from letting himself just thrust into Mark’s mouth and everything is just so—

Before Dustin entirely realizes what’s happening, the world’s going a little white and he’s coming into Mark’s mouth. 

It takes a bit to come back to himself, but when he does, he’s still leaning against the stall and Mark’s standing in front of him, jerking himself off, which is just so Mark that Dustin’s not entirely sure what to do with it. But he’s kind of leaning toward reciprocation, so he stills Mark’s wrist and spins him around to press his back against the cold metal, dropping to his knees as he does it. 

He can tell, from Mark’s heavy breathing and lidded eyes and from the fact that he has actually done this before a couple of times, that it’s not going to take long, so he doesn’t waste time teasing, just gets down to business. (To defeat the huns, his mind supplies helpfully.) Dustin takes Mark into his mouth and hums a little, enjoying the noise—the _whimper_ —that Mark makes and the way his hand clenches uselessly against Dustin’s head, not tight enough to pull at his hair but definitely enough to make a point. 

As he predicted, it doesn’t take him very long to have Mark actually pulling at his hair and tensing under the hands wrapped against his hips. Dustin swallows, which is mildly unpleasant—blowjobs aren’t something he’s done enough to be really used to—but he figures that if Mark can do it for him, he ought to at least give it a shot. 

Dustin wipes himself off and fixes his pants up, vaguely unsure of what to do after that. Mark isn’t exactly saying anything, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise but then, well, they just had sex in a bathroom stall. Everything is so completely out of the realm of anything Dustin would have predicted that Mark voluntarily engaging in conversation doesn’t seem too crazy anymore. 

He doesn’t, though, and Dustin ends up just walking out of the bathroom by himself, leaving behind an awkward silence. 

 

Two days later, Chris calls him, just to chat. It hasn’t happened in a while, and Dustin’s missed it. They talk for far longer than he’d anticipated—he’s gotten used to Mark’s terse, to-the-point phone calls, lost the habit of spending an hour on the phone just rambling about his life and listening to Chris ramble in return. 

He considers mentioning what he and Mark did at least six times, but never actually works up the courage to say the words. 

Chris hangs up after a longish lull in the conversation, saying that his boyfriend is nagging him to get ready to go out to dinner. Apparently they’re having a date night. 

Dustin is left alone at home to cope with his seething jealousy. 

Because he’s a semi-well-adjusted person, he calls Mark and asks him to come over for beer and video games. It’s not until after he makes the call that he remembers what happened the last time they did that, and by then it’s too late to take it back. 

Not that he really wants to, anyway. 

Getting laid might help with the whole wallowing in bitter resentment problem he has going on. 

So when, after a few predictably vicious rounds of Call of Duty and a couple of beers, he wants to lean over and press his lips to the hollow underneath Mark’s ear, he doesn’t try to stop himself. 

Mark, immediately pauses the game and turns his head to meet Dustin’s lips. 

Before long they’re significantly more horizontal, with Mark pinning him to the couch and rolling his hips against Dustin’s until they both come. 

That’s how they wake up the following morning, half-tangled together. Dustin’s legs have fallen asleep from the press of Mark’s against them, but it’s not the least comfortable position he’s ever woken up in, not after years of falling asleep over his laptop and waking up with the keys outlined on his face. 

Dustin considers letting Mark rest, because god knows that he probably needs the sleep, but the tingling in his thighs is getting unbearable, so he pokes at Mark until he wakes up, blinking and confused. 

“Get off me,” Dustin mumbles at him, his throat too dry to try for anything more vehement. 

“You’re squishy,” Mark says, which isn’t really apropos of anything, and Dustin’s not quite awake enough to know whether he should be offended. Instead of replying, he just shoves at Mark’s shoulders weakly. 

“I can’t feel my legs,” he says. 

Reluctantly and drowsily, Mark pushes himself up, nearly falling off the sofa in the process. 

It’s kind of cute. 

He rubs his eyes, staring at the coffee table—it’s a different shape than the one in Mark’s own living room, and thus probably the main source of his confusion—before he turns around and squints at Dustin. 

“Stop looking at me all scrunchy-faced,” Dustin tells him. “It makes you all squinty and funny-looking.” 

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Mark replies. “And move your legs so I can sit down.”

Dustin’s not sure he can.

“I’m not sure I can,” he says. “They’re asleep.”

Mark rolls his eyes, picks up Dustin’s legs—and Dustin’s laptop from the coffee table—and flops onto the couch, dropping Dustin’s legs on top of his and setting the laptop down on them. 

Scrunching his nose up, Dustin points out that the laptop is password-protected, which actually makes Mark laugh.

“Hey!” Dustin objects.

But it takes Mark about thirty seconds of tapping to guess his password (it probably would’ve been less if he’d just hacked the computer), so maybe he has a point. Barely any time later, Mark is typing away, clearly engrossed in his work, and Dustin’s left with his feet trapped between Mark’s legs and the computer and nothing to do. 

As any sane person would, he lets himself sink into the couch and goes back to sleep. 

When he wakes up some indeterminate amount of time later, he’s still trapped and Mark’s still working, but he’s no longer sleepy enough to be sympathetic. 

In other words, this time he squirms. 

Not so much that Mark might drop the laptop, because he kind of likes having that in one piece, but enough to jar him from his code-induced haze. And as soon as one of his feet is free enough to slide out from under the computer, he puts it to good use tickling Mark. 

Unfortunately, it appears that at some point during the time since they moved into a suite together at Harvard, Mark learned to _not_ squeal when someone touches his ribs. Dustin pouts a bit at this development, and settles for climbing off the sofa (as there’s nothing more he can do there that’ll be interesting) and traipsing toward the kitchen to get some food. 

He brews some coffee, throws an apple into the living room at Mark’s head—it thuds against the sofa next to him; Dustin needs to work on his aim—and digs around in the fridge until he finds something vaguely edible, meaning yogurt that’s only a couple of days past the sell-by date, and grabs a banana off the counter. Unlike Mark, he’s not an incurable workaholic, so he grabs a week-old magazine off the counter to read while he eats breakfast. 

After spending a couple of hours settled next to Mark on the couch—he is _not_ going to use the word snuggled, even if it might be appropriate, given how close together they were sitting—Dustin kicks him out. He doesn’t have any particular reason; Mark’s not terrible company, all things considered, and he’s going out for drinks with a couple of guys from work, but that’s not until much later. 

It’s just—it’s just _weird_ , sitting around all day with Mark like they live together or hang our all the time or whatever. It brings up memories of Kirkland, of spending afternoons sitting around with Mark and Chris and, as often as not, Eduardo, and how comfortable everything was then. 

Dustin would rather not dwell on that too much. It just hurts more than he wants to deal with. 

 

They never talk about it, but later that month, after a dinner Mark forced Dustin to drive him to on the grounds that he wouldn’t be able to stand it unless he was too drunk to drive home, Mark kisses him instead of getting out of the car when Dustin drops him off, and they end up rubbing off against each other in the foyer of his house.

And then, you know, actually fucking in his bed. 

It’s not like Mark’s draped all over him when they wake up the next morning or anything, but they’re definitely touching. Mark’s ankle is crossed over his where he’s sprawled on his stomach, and his hand is resting lightly on Dustin’s stomach. 

Dustin’s not quite sure what to make of the situation. It’s disconcertingly intimate, like they fell asleep not touching at all and inched toward each other overnight. 

He brushes the thought away as he slips out from under Mark’s limbs and into the bathroom to shower, but it sneaks back in at inopportune moments. Sleeping with your best friend is one of those things that every movie ever made has taught him is a bad idea. It mixes up a thousand emotions that probably shouldn’t get jumbled together, and running behind it all, like a horrible depressing mantra, is the fact that he’s in love with Chris. 

It’s a terrible idea and Dustin knows it, and he ought to walk back into the bedroom and tell Mark that they’re not going to do it again. He could even list off all the reasons they shouldn’t. 

But stupidly, probably because he’s never been so good at self-denial, Dustin doesn’t. 

Because he doesn’t call it off, he doesn’t stop falling into bed with Mark a couple times a month (and then a couple times a week). It’s nice to have someone around, honestly; sometimes Mark is enough to take his mind off Chris, and even when he isn’t, having someone around is better than spending his nights perpetually alone. They have something of a pattern by now, where they end up in each others’ beds when they work late or after parties or when one of them calls the other over for beer and video games. It’s not quite a booty call—they actually do drink beer and play video games—but it’s close. They’re both smart enough to know, if it weren’t for the promise of sex, the preceding activities wouldn’t have taken place. 

It’s not so bad, really. 

Mark's—well, he's not Chris, obviously, because Chris is Chris and no one else could possibly be Chris. 

(It's possible he’s a little drunk; tonight’s been a night of more beer than video games, the long final day of a long week during which he and Mark each aged about four years from stress.)

But then, Dustin's not Eduardo, so they're probably about even. 

Mark's _there_ , though. (Unlike Chris, Dustin's mind supplies, alcohol-soaked and morose.) He's convenient and present and they get along and, hell, the sex is good. And it's not even like he lacks feeling for Mark, not really. It's not like it is when he's around Chris, but Dustin doesn't mind so much. 

Life's not perfect. 

But it’s enough, Dustin figures. Everything will work itself out eventually, right?

 

 

When Dustin answers his phone, too hurried and distracted to glance at the name flashing at him, Chris’s hello is shaky, almost tearful. 

“Are you okay?” Dustin asks, automatic; being concerned with Chris’s well-being is basically his constant state of existence. 

There’s silence on the other end of the line for a long moment, and then Chris says, “I—I think I will be.”

He’s not sure how to answer that. If they were in the same room, he would have hugged Chris enthusiastically and offered to marathon movies and drink until he forgot about whatever was bumming him out, but that’s not exactly an option. 

“Is there any way I can stay with you for a little while?” Chris says into the silence, interrupting Dustin’s thoughts. 

“Of course,” Dustin answers, half habit and half just—well, he doesn’t particularly enjoy saying no to Chris, especially when Chris sounds like he’s close to tears. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Chris doesn’t answer immediately, and Dustin really, _really_ just wants to be able to hug him or punch whoever made this happen or force him to watch a stupid comedy or just make bad jokes until he cracked a reluctant smile. 

“I don’t really want to go into it,” Chris begins. “But the moral of the story is that Scott and I broke up and I just don’t want to be in New York right now.”

“You can stay here as long as you need to,” Dustin tells him, even if it’s only about a third generosity, because he’s definitely selfish enough to want Chris in his house, where they can eat dinner together or watch movies together or—whatever. Dustin kind of doesn’t care, as long as he gets to do it _with Chris_ , which he knows is stupid and selfish and everything he shouldn’t be anymore but he kind of doesn’t care. 

“Thank you,” Chris is saying sincerely, “You’re a good friend.”

Dustin just swallows everything stupid he might blurt out and says, “It’s no big deal, Chris. Really.”

But he worries a little, after that. 

He’s known Chris for a long time now, since they were teenagers and young and overwhelmed by college, and it’s incredibly unlike him to run across the country after a breakup, however messy. Chris just—doesn’t let other people break him like that. He’s so self-assured and confident and obviously he’s still all of those things, because Dustin is pretty sure that anything bad enough to make Chris almost-cry on the phone would have reduced him to an emotional wreck incapable of functioning like a normal person. Still, though, he worries. 

Ten days later, he picks Chris up at the airport, where he’s standing outside the baggage carousel with two suitcases and wry smile. 

“Thanks for coming to get me,” he says to Dustin, who ignores that completely and hugs him instead. 

Chris doesn’t fight it, or grumble about how Dustin shouldn’t leave his car idling in the pick-up zone because it’s destroying the environment and against the rules away. He just kind of—gives, burying his face in Dustin’s shoulder, and Dustin is pretty sure that this is what heartbreak feels like. He curls an arm around Chris and rubs at the back of his shoulders until he feels Chris pulling away a bit.

He’s smiling weakly when he meets Dustin’s eyes. “I needed that,” he says. 

“It was my pleasure,” Dustin answers, grinning a little even though he’s pretty sure it’s not an appropriate response. “Here, I’ll throw your stuff in the trunk and then we can go home.”

“Sounds good,” Chris says, but Dustin knows him well enough to catch the unevenness in his tone. Now isn’t the right time to bring it up, though, he knows that as well. This isn’t a conversation to have driving along the highway, not when Chris isn’t going to want to have it at all. Of course, if whatever happened is bad enough to have him running across the country, Chris probably _ought_ to have it whether he wants to or not. 

And so, a few hours later, he’s provided Chris with comfort food and decent wine, and they’re curled up at opposite ends of the couch watching some serious movie that Chris had requested and Dustin had allowed, against his better judgment. They’ve talked over most of it anyway, about Facebook and Mark and Chris’s plans for what he’s going to do in Palo Alto. 

Now they’re sitting in semi-comfortable silence, both watching the movie. 

“Scott told me,” Chris begins, and Dustin turns toward him. He’s staring at the screen but his eyes aren’t focused on it. “Scott told me,” he starts again, “That I’m so busy helping total strangers that I can’t see when the people right in front of me are having a hard time.”

“Chris,” Dustin says, “You know that’s—”

But Chris cuts him off. “It is true, though. I hadn’t talked to you and Mark for more than a month. I hadn’t talked to my fucking _parents_ for a month, Dustin.”

“Everyone gets busy sometimes,” he tries to answer, but Chris is on a roll now. 

“Maybe if I had done a better job paying attention to the people around me, things wouldn’t have fallen apart so spectacularly with Mark and Eduardo.”

Dustin just gapes at him. It honestly hadn’t occurred to him that Chris could be blaming himself for _that_ , for something that far outside his control. 

“Chris,” he tries again, reaching forward to rest what he hopes is a soothing hand on Chris’s knee, “You shouldn’t blame yourself for that.”

“I could have helped, though,” Chris says. “You know they just weren’t listening to each other. I could have, I don’t know, _made_ them listen.” He trails off a little aimlessly. 

Almost at loss for words, Dustin slides towards him and rests a hand against his back. “Nothing you could have said would have made them listen, you know that. They were too busy hearing what they wanted to hear.”

Chris shrugs weakly. 

“Come on,” Dustin says, “I think we ought to go to bed.”

They stumble upstairs together and head towards their respective rooms, but once he’s curled in his bed, Dustin has trouble falling asleep. It’s disconcerting to be the stable one, even if it’s only temporarily. But that was always Chris’s domain—occasionally Eduardo’s—and seeing him this shaken is, in turn, shaking Dustin up a little bit. He tries not to wonder how Eduardo’s doing, worry about whether he’s okay, but it’s difficult not to. 

His attempts not to miss Eduardo never go very well. Honestly, they usually lead to him missing Eduardo even more. 

There’s probably some psychological principle at work there. 

Dustin starts rolling over with the intent of asking Mark what it is, but then he remembers that Mark’s asleep in his own bed. Well, realistically speaking, Mark’s probably not asleep yet, but the point is that he’s not anywhere near Dustin’s bed. 

Chris is down the hall, though. That’s a fair trade-off. 

Right?

 

Dustin’s half-playing that Neopets game with the flying ice cream scoops and half scribbling notes on a legal pad when Mark appears behind him. He doesn’t even bother trying to minimize when he hears the footsteps; he tried explaining that vapid games help him process about once a week for the first year of facebook without much success, but Mark’s seen enough results to have accepted that it works for Dustin. 

“Neopets?” Mark says incredulously. “At least you used to play real games.”

At the noise, Dustin jumps a little, and the little thing he’s moving around slams into an ice cream scoop.

“The repetitive motion of avoiding the scoops is soothing,” Dustin says—bullshits, really. “And you just made me die!” He doesn’t even need to turn around to know that Mark’s rolling his eyes. 

“Are you even working on things for facebook?” Mark asks, his voice wry. 

“No.”

Mark just laughs. 

“What are you going to do, fire me?” Dustin says, giving up on this particular round of the game and turning to smirk at Mark. It wouldn’t happen, he knows (he’s fairly certain, anyway). If playing video games at work and generally mouthing off to his boss haven’t gotten him sacked at any point in the last few years, it was unlikely to now, given that he was already in the process of leaving. 

And so what if that process was taking a long time? He’d been deeply involved in facebook nearly from its inception; of course extricating himself would be a time-confusing endeavor. 

Ignoring the question entirely, Mark just says, “Can you get back to me about the chat update by the end of the day?”

“Sure thing, boss-man,” Dustin replies, turning back to his computer. He has an email from Chris, asking him what time he’s going to be home from work and if he has any plans for dinner. 

That routine continues more or less unchanged for a few days—Dustin goes to work, Chris stays at the house (moping, though Dustin never calls him on it), and when he gets home, they have dinner together. It’s unlike Chris, but Dustin doesn’t call him on it. Everyone has bad days sometimes. 

Somewhat predictably, given his tendencies towards perfection and also being a digustingly put-together person, one day shortly after he arrived, Chris is up before Dustin. There’s coffee in the coffee maker and a post-it stuck to the microwave announcing that he was out on a run and would be back—Dustin glances at the clock—in about fifteen minutes. 

It actually turns out to be more like half an hour, and by the time Chris comes into the kitchen and flops down at the table, Dustin has eaten most of his bowl of cereal and is more or less focusing on answering some emails that he honestly should probably have dealt with the night before. 

“I have a job interview today,” Chris says, running a hand through his—somewhat wet—hair and taking a long pull from the water bottle in front of him. 

“Yeah?” Dustin says. He’s a lot happier than he should be, but then it’s—well, it’s _Chris_ , and he’s been over invested in Chris’s happiness for as long as he can remember. 

“Yeah,” Chris says, grinning. It’s the most honest smile that Dustin’s seen on his face since he showed up in California, and seeing it makes everything about Dustin feel a little lighter, like worrying about Chris was physically weighing him down. “It’s with this non-profit start-up and they want me to run their online operations. The interview’s mostly a formality, or at least that’s the impression I got.”

Dustin can’t really help smiling back, because he can read in Chris’s face that he’s biting back an enthusiastic fit of babbling—probably about how much he’s looking forward to working with the company and how amazing the work they do it and how many people he’ll be able to help. Heartwarming doesn’t even begin to cover it. 

So the routine changes a little bit after that, because Chris gets up stupidly early and runs and goes to work, and Dustin stays at work stupidly late as often as not, but they’re still both there in the evenings, when they usually make dinner (okay, Chris usually makes dinner) and watch movies or talk or play games. It’s a little like being back at Kirkland, except without the stress of college and Mark snapping at anyone who interrupted his coding tears (except for Eduardo, because Eduardo was _different_ ). So basically, it’s all (well, most) of the best things about living in a suite with two of his best friends, minus the annoying friend. 

And _god_ , the temptation to just lean over and kiss Chris is just the same as it was at Harvard. If anything, Dustin thinks it might be worse. Getting a few years older hasn’t exactly made Chris less attractive and now there isn’t the threat of Mark wandering in distractedly, wanting to ask some stupid question about facebook or why they were out of Red Bull or whatever the fuck it was that he noticed when he wasn’t fixated on his laptop or Eduardo’s stupid hair. So sitting at one end of the couch with Chris’s legs in his lap and watching his eyelids droop a little, his head on the armrest. It’s a little like psychological torture. 

“Go to bed, Chris,” Dustin says. 

Clearly half asleep, Chris responds only with a soft and noncommittal hum, gesturing vaguely toward the TV. 

“You’re clearly falling asleep,” Dustin continues, laughing a little. “You’re not even going to remember what’s happening in the movie.”

“Yeah, but,” Chris says, trailing off. It’s entirely possible he’s just too tired to construct a coherent argument. “I wanna watch it now,” he whines. 

“Fine,” Dustin says, “But I’m not watching it with you again when you forget the second half.”

The thing is, having a roommate in college is one thing—there are people around all the time, his other suitemate(s), people wandering in from the hall—but it turns out, having a housemate who also happens to be his best friend (that he’s a little in love with) and no one else around to buffer their interactions on a regular basis feels really, unbelievably _domestic_. It’s disconcerting. Like, Dustin’s pretty sure that, except for the part where they don’t kiss or have sex, this is exactly what living with Chris would be like if they _did_. 

He squints a little, not entirely sure that last thought made sense. Something pokes him in the leg, and he looks down to see Chris’s toe digging into his thigh. 

“You’re not payin’ ‘ttention either,” Chris says sleepily. 

“I’m not the one who wanted to watch the movie,” Dustin answers, picking up Chris’s foot and putting it back in his lap. Chris just laughs softly and curls up so that he’s lying flat on the couch. 

And the night like that one, where they’re touching all the time and it’s stupid and domestic and just makes Dustin want _everything_? They happen _so fucking much_. At this rate, it’s going to drive him to drink. 

He can’t make the first move, at least not right now. He’s been accused of insensitivity (not Mark-scale insensitivity, but still) but Dustin knows that you don’t confess to having been in love with your best friend since college while he’s getting over a bad breakup and trying to sort out a new life across the country. 

Instead, he just kind of never asks when Chris is leaving. He can afford his own place, but having the company is nice and Chris is _Chris_ and Dustin knows him well enough to know that he’ll probably leave if Dustin even so much as implies that he’s been there longer than he’s welcome to stay. 

Of course, Dustin would be happy to have him stay forever, but Chris doesn’t know that. 

 

Regardless, Dustin makes a valiant effort at keeping to the status quo. As so many of his valiant efforts have done, though, it fails miserably. Mostly because a few days after the movie viewing of interminable sexual tension (that Dustin was probably half imagining; whatever), Chris meets his eyes as they’re moving around the kitchen to make coffee and throw together a bit of breakfast and says, “Are you planning on kicking me out at some point?”

It’s uncharacteristically blunt for him—a sure sign that something is wrong—and Dustin is taken aback. Before he even considers his answer, though, he hears himself answer, calmly and decisively, that he’s really not going to. 

“Oh,” Chris says, turning back to the coffeemaker. 

“Is everything okay?” Dustin asks, sitting down and sipping cautiously at the coffee and then downing a huge mouthful once he’s sure it’s cool enough to drink. 

“Everything’s fine,” Chris replies. “I just don’t want to overstay my welcome. There are probably other people you want to be having to stay.”

As Chris slips into the seat across from him, Dustin feels the words “Stay forever” form in his throat and it takes all his willpower and a huge gulp of coffee besides to keep from saying them. 

“That’s not something you ever need to worry about he,” he says instead. “And,” he adds, his voice light even if his mood isn’t, “having you here keeps Mark from using the couch as an auxiliary coding room. You’re a much better houseguest than he is.”

It’s not true, though. Well, it is—Chris is a superb houseguest. He does his own dishes and his own laundry and cleans, well, he cleans most of the house. It’s just that Dustin has stopped really thinking of Chris as a guest at all; he’s become more like a semi-permanent fixture in the house, and Dustin’s not wild about the idea of returning to a Chris-less existence. 

“Do you not want to be here anymore?” Dustin asks, struck with a sudden worry that maybe Chris was just trying to find a polite way to extricate himself from the house—or, worse, from Dustin’s life. Again. 

He doesn’t usually worry like this, has always been fairly confident in his position as a well-liked person, but Chris throws him off balance, mostly by making everything just matter so much more. The idea of having someone else not want to live with him doesn’t even phase him, but having Chris not want to would be a giant kick in the face of his dearest, unlikeliest dream. 

Idly, briefly, he considers what it would be like if he were having this conversation with Mark. It would still hurt, he realizes. Differently, a bit, but it would still hurt. 

“No,” Chris answers, vehemently.

“Okay,” Dustin says, catching Chris’s eye and smiling comically wide. Chris kicks him under the table. 

“You’re going to be late for work,” Chris points out, downing the rest of his coffee and standing up. 

“So what?” Dustin says. “It’s not like my boss actually knows how to show up on time.”

“Actually,” Chris starts to say, leaning against the doorframe, “I seem to recall—”

Dustin cuts him off. “That was just because he was scared of you. Without the threat of a severe dressing-down, he’s got nothing to motivate him to be in the office before 11. At the earliest.”

“Still, don’t you need to be there to supervise your employees? I know the programmers start obscenely early.”

“Nope,” Dustin says, grinning. “As it turns out, they’re all scared of me. Someone started a rumor about me teaching myself to code in three days—”

“I’m not sure it’s called a rumor if it’s actually _true_ ,” Chris complains. 

“—and now all the programmers are really intimidated and too afraid to ask me for help.”

Chris laughs. 

“I’m kind of offended,” Dustin says, mock-angry. 

“You’re just the least intimidating person ever,” Chris tells him, grinning. 

“I can be intimidating if I want to be,” Dustin whines.

“Of course you can,” Chris says. “If you give up playing flash games intended for twelve-year-olds, novelty boxers, spontaneously bursting into song, and cuddling.”

“I could do that,” Dustin insists. “I just don’t want to. I would lose all my charm!”

“Oh, is that what you’re calling it now?”

“Shut up, you know you like it,” Dustin says, standing and brushing past Chris to leave the kitchen. “Apparently I’m going to be late for work.”

From the stairs, he calls back, “Aren’t _you_ going to be late too?”

“I have the day off!”

“Fuck you!”

Dustin can just barely hear Chris’s laughter as he gets into the shower. 

That night, as he throws his backpack roughly onto the weirdly angled chair in the living room that no one uses for anything other than piling stuff, Chris calls to him from the kitchen. “I made dinner.” 

“You would make an exceptional housewife,” Dustin shouts. 

“I would make an exceptionally _bored_ housewife,” Chris calls back. 

“That too,” Dustin says as he walks into the kitchen. When Chris said that he made dinner, he wasn’t kidding. Dustin was anticipating pasta or maybe omelets, but instead, there’s a bottle of wine open on the kitchen table, some extravagant-looking fish concoction in a skillet on the stove, and a box on the counter that he rather suspects came from a gourmet store. It might be chocolate. 

“Damn,” Dustin says, impressed. “You weren’t kidding.”

Chris turns slightly red and says, “Yeah, I got a little ambitious.”

Dustin’s not sure that hugging him is the appropriate thing to do, even though he really wants to because Chris is adorable and blushing and made him—made them? It’s amazing either way—a fancy dinner. If Dustin were the type of person to jump to conclusions about other people (which he is, but to a much lesser extent than Mark or even Chris), he might think that Chris was trying to seduce him. 

That’s probably not an idea he should let his brain run away with. 

Of course, then Chris starts pouring the wine and ushering Dustin towards his usual chair. If he’d thought—and he had—that their lives had gotten weirdly domestic, well, this took it to a whole new level. It was like he’d moved into an especially progressive episode of Leave it to Beaver or something. 

Like he knew what Dustin was thinking and wanted to complete the illusion, Chris said, “How was your day?” as he dished the food out quickly.

“Pretty uneventful,” Dustin answers. “Nothing crashed, no one set anything on fire, and Mark only yelled at me once.”

Chris laughs, shaking his head a little. “Did you run out of time to provoke him?”

“He was in meetings most of the day, actually. So he was too busy yelling at other people to pick on me.”

“I’m not sure that counts, Dustin,” Chris says, mock-serious. He sets the dishes of food down on the table and drops into his hair. Before Chris has even has time to reach for a serving spoon, Dustin is reaching to serve himself. It’s been a while since he had anything this impressive; Chris cooks pretty regularly but he doesn’t usually have time to pull together fancy meals. 

The fish thing, whatever it is, is predictably amazing. Like, foodgasm amazing. Dustin never wants it to not be in his mouth. He tells Chris as much. 

Chris, for his part, blushes and little and thanks him. 

They chat amiably over their food, as usual; Chris has a tale of woe about crazy people at the specialty grocery store, and Dustin jokingly soothes him, rebutting with his own story of the old man convinced that Dustin’s email was actually his son’s—of note, of course, was the fact that this guy was not Dustin’s father. 

He tries not to get too distracted by the way Chris’s eyes crinkle up when he laughs or how broadly he’s smiling even as he implores Dustin to be nice to the man. 

“I was!” Dustin says. “But he wouldn’t believe me. I kept telling him that I’m not who he thought I was, but he clearly just wasn’t getting the message.”

Chris snickers softly.

“Pun intended,” Dustin concludes. 

Making Chris laugh is, like, the highlight of any day when he pulls it off, and he’s done it multiple times today. Possibly the best day ever. 

Well, after the day he decided to start sneaking movie quotes into facebook’s code. 

He looks up from his plate to see that Chris’s smile has calmed slightly into something that’s more fond than it is amused, and he’s holding his wine glass. Quickly, Chris downs the rest of his wine and sets the glass back on the table. There’s a purpose to his movement usually absent from their casual dinners. 

In the silence, he reaches forward and rests his hand over Dustin’s where it lies on the table. Dustin swallows his questions, not wanting to break the moment, but Chris seems expectant, somehow. At a loss for anything else to do, Dustin turns his hand over and lets their palms rest against each other. 

He guesses that was the right thing to do because Chris meets his eyes and doesn’t look away. 

It feels almost like a mating ritual of some sort—Dustin’s pretty sure he’s not making things up when he thinks that—but no one has taught him the rules. He’s used to flirting at parties and joking with strangers at bars, but he’s never had Chris watching him intently across his kitchen table. It’s disconcerting and exciting and overwhelming all at the same time. 

But mostly it’s confusing, because Dustin doesn’t know to act. He knows for sure that it’s better to have Chris around and pine a bit than it is for Chris to be across the country and he doesn’t want to drive him away. 

At this point, it’s probably a stupid fear, given that he’s never seen that look—intense and full of feelings he doesn’t want to name and _focused_ —on Chris’s face before. But there’s nothing better than fear at holding people back; there’s a reason the posters around facebook tell people, basically, not to be afraid. 

While Dustin is trying not to be crippled by fear, he feels Chris twine their fingers together slowly and it occurs to him that maybe he’s not the only one not entirely sure what to do. 

“Chris,” he begins to say, not really having decided where the sentence should go but unable to handle the silence any longer. 

“Yeah?” Chris says, cocking his head. 

Dustin squeezes his hand for lack of a better thing to do. 

Chris bites his lip. 

There’s a moment of utter stillness, and then Chris starts to lean forward incrementally, so slow and hesitant that Dustin wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been focused only on Chris. Dustin tilts his head slightly and leans slightly forward as well. 

The table’s not particularly wide, just a small breakfast one, and neither of them has to move too far before Dustin feels Chris’s lips brush against the corner of his mouth. It’s barely even a kiss, not by the standards of anyone out of elementary school, but still. Chris’s lips touched his. 

Dustin doesn’t quite pull back, and Chris doesn’t quite pull back either, and they’re left hanging, almost kissing but not quite. It’s too close for conversation but too far for anything else, and mostly Dustin just wants to kiss him again.

Before he can second-guess himself (again), he lets his head move forward the minute amount it takes for him to be kissing Chris again—for real this time, his lips lingering but not forcing. And then Chris’s hand tightens around his, and he presses his mouth a little harder against Dustin’s and, okay, yeah, they’re kissing for real now. Chris’s lips are sealed over his, and he can feel Chris’s tongue ghosting across his lip. 

The fact that there’s a table between them is going to get problematic pretty soon, because Dustin really wants to curl his hands around Chris’s hips and feel the warm skin of his back and taste the mixture of sweat and soap on his neck. 

Chris runs his free hand down the back of Dustin’s neck—Dustin shivers a little bit—and, after pressing a brief kiss to his lips, pulls back enough to talk to him. 

“Are we doing this?” he asks. 

“Hmm?” Dustin says, still a little hung up on the feel of Chris’s fingers running down his neck. 

“I just.” Chris hesitates, glances down. “I just want to be sure that this means the same thing to both of us.”

Dustin swallows. “This isn’t a joke,” he says. He swallows the words that threaten to follow it, offering to back off if Chris isn’t serious about it, but this matters too much. 

“Good,” Chris says. His fingers trail across Dustin’s cheek and Dustin turns his head to press a light kiss to Chris’s palm. Chris starts to lean in toward him again, but Dustin pulls away and stands up. 

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” he says, standing in front of Chris and pulling him out of his chair. “I don’t want to make us wait any longer than we need to.”

Chris’s eyes flick down over his torso—and lower—and then back up to his lips. 

“Okay,” he says.

And then Dustin is kind of pressed against the wall and being kissed more thoroughly than he thinks he’s even been before. 

They don’t even make it upstairs the first time. 

 

Being curled up against Chris, their foreheads nearly touching, ranks pretty damn high on the list of best places Dustin’s ever been. It’s comfortable and _warm_ in a way that goes beyond the physical, like his heart is warm or maybe glowing. He feels kind of stupidly sappy thinking about it, letting himself get hypnotized by the soft touch of Chris’s fingers as they trace his ribs. 

When he lets himself drift too far into his thoughts, almost more asleep than awake, he finally notices it, this stupid little twinge of _missing_. He misses the way Mark sprawls across the bed, greedy and starfish-like and uncharacteristically cuddly, his limbs heavy where they drape across Dustin’s and the weight somehow—anchoring. 

And then the guilt sets in. 

He didn’t exactly call things off with Mark before he—yeah. It was more like they stopped. They weren’t exclusive or anything, he tells himself, not quite believing the words even as he thinks them. It’s not like they went on dates or were _Facebook official_. They never made each other any promises. And besides, there wasn’t any official starting point to it, either. 

It was just sex.

Right?

But Dustin’s half asleep and he’s still pretty sure that friends-with-benefits don’t spend the night curled up together, or make each other breakfast (okay, toast, sometimes burned; neither he nor Mark is exactly a culinary genius), or kiss each other goodbye in the mornings (it only happened a few times, and after all of them, Mark pulled away, blushing and biting his lip, but it still happened). The more he thinks about those things (and about the thousand other stupid things he and Mark do together), the more it feels startlingly—domestic. Like they could probably have spent the rest of their lives doing that and no one would have thought it was odd. 

It’s—confusing does not even begin to cover what it is. And Dustin’s being lulled to sleep by Chris’s touch, too drowsy and comfortable to try and make sense of his life. 

He wakes the next morning wrapped around Chris, who’s still sound asleep, curled in on himself. Dustin runs his fingers softly across Chris’s forehead, barely even moving his hair, and tries to go back to sleep. Just staring at him would be, well, a little creepier than he’s entirely comfortable being, but he doesn’t want to get up and he certainly doesn’t want to wake Chris, who just looks so _tired_ all the time now. 

Lying there, though, unable to sleep and too comfortably happy to get up, it’s hard to keep from thinking. 

And Dustin’s not entirely sure he likes where his thoughts are going. 

He never anticipated circumstances under which he might be lying in bed with Chris and not be completely and totally happy, and the sheer insanity of missing _Mark_ of all people is baffling to him. 

Dustin forces himself to put it from his mind, at least for now. Sleep—and Chris—are more important. 

In all honesty, it’s not the fault of his wandering thoughts when he’s late to work the following day. That one falls entirely on the (arguably somewhat ill-advised) decision to have morning sex. Not that Dustin regrets it or anything, because really, rolling around in bed with Chris (and the orgasms!) was a perfectly wonderful way to start the day. 

Unfortunately, in addition to being late to work, Dustin discovers once he’s there that he kind of has a giant hickey on his neck. Or at least he hopes that’s the reason that people are staring at his neck, because the alternatives are kind of creepy. Honestly, he doesn’t care that much if people know he got laid, but he also kind of doesn’t want Mark to find out—and then come to the blindingly obvious and also correct conclusions—before Dustin has a chance to talk to him and break the news gently, or whatever. 

Of course, he has absolutely no luck whatsoever. (Frankly, he probably used it all up in the process of somehow making Chris want to kiss him and have sex with him and—yeah, that was pretty fucking lucky, really.) Mark walks into his office way earlier than Dustin expects him to; frankly, it’s way earlier than Mark is usually at the office at all. 

Dustin’s tapping away at his email, so the voice behind him comes as a complete shock. 

“Are you actually working?” he hears Mark say, half incredulous, half laughing. 

“No,” Dustin replies, deadpan. 

Mark doesn’t quite giggle, but it’s a frighteningly near thing. 

“Um,” Dustin says. He doesn’t turn away from his computer, just stares down at the keyboard and grimaces preemptively.

“Spit it out,” Mark says. Dustin swallows hard and spins around to face him. Mark’s eyes trail across the hickey he located in the mirror after three interns didn’t meet his eyes on his way to his desk. 

“We can’t do our—thing—anymore,” Dustin says, possibly more bluntly than he should have. 

“What?” Mark’s eyes were still resting on the hickey, not meeting Dustin’s.

Okay, yeah, maybe that wasn’t clear enough. 

“The thing,” Dustin tries again, “You know, where we have sex. We can’t do that anymore.”

“Oh,” Mark says. “Okay.” There’s a brief pause, and then he continues. “Can you finish that thing I told you about yesterday?”

“Oh, sure,” Dustin says. 

Mark doesn’t talk to him for the rest of the day, but around 5:30, Dustin gets an email telling him to go home, because he probably has more important things to be doing. It’s beyond strange, given that Mark is Mark, and given that they’d sort of been, well, fuck buddies or something. Dustin shrugs it off and stays for another 35 minutes—Chris is a bit of a workaholic anyway, he won’t be home till later. 

When Dustin finally does get home, Chris is already there. Honestly, things don’t change that much from all the other nights he’s come home to find Chris curled up in the living room reading or standing in the kitchen making dinner or lazing at the kitchen table with his laptop. He does get a quick kiss hello, which definitely a pleasant change, but that’s the only real difference. 

With the exception of there being more kissing and more sex, really, Dustin’s life doesn’t change in any noticeable way now that he and Chris are—whatever they are. Boyfriends, probably. The biggest shift is that the guest room Chris had been occupying slowly edges towards complete disuse. Like, living together would probably have been a big step except that they already kind of were, and if they were going to be having sex almost every night—and seriously, Dustin cannot imagine _not >_ wanting to have sex with Chris regularly—there was no reason that they shouldn’t just sleep in the same bed. They snuggle a bit more, Dustin supposes, but there was already kind of a lot of snuggling before, so yeah.

Honestly, the only change bigger than there being a sudden uptick in Dustin’s sex life is the way that Mark treats them. He got, well, quite frankly, he got _bitchy_. At work, he gets even tetchier than usual, and outside of work, he stops making any effort to spend time with them. Not that he’d made much of one before—it was Mark—but now there’s just nothing. 

Most days, Dustin avoids him, but a certain amount of interaction between him and, well, his boss is unavoidable. Mark’s even more terse than usual; when Dustin wanders into his office half out of habit and half to run some stuff by him, he doesn’t even grudgingly engage in banter. In fact, Mark barely takes his eyes off his computer screen the entire time Dustin is talking to him. 

If Dustin were going to speculate, he would say that Mark was jealous. 

Not that that really makes sense or anything, because Mark’s not going to be chosen as captain of the feelings squad anytime soon. He’s pretty sure that if Mark had an emotional experience that he understood, his head would explode. It’s not even that he thinks Mark doesn’t have feelings, it’s that if Mark actually paid attention to them, he might have to focus on something other than computers and his own intellect for a few seconds, and then it might start raining fire so maybe Dustin shouldn’t hope for that too much.

Chris invites Mark over for dinner the week after everything started going weird, because he thought Dustin was exaggerating the weirdness, and because Chris does things like that. He has people over for dinner because that’s what adults do with their friends—whereas Mark and Dustin tended to just fall sideways into evenings spent together much as they had in college. 

The three of them sitting around the table together isn’t comfortable, at least not for Dustin. Mark’s not making eye contact with either of them, though he is shoving his food around his plate like a grouchy kid who doesn’t want to eat his peas. Dustin can recognize the behavior from doing it _all the time_ as a kid. 

Under the table, he lets his ankle rest against Chris’s, hoping that the contact grounds him somehow. It works, sort of. The touch of skin to his is a reminder of what he has, of Chris and comfort and why he definitely shouldn’t be remembering what Mark’s lips felt like pressed to his. Or what they felt like pressed anywhere else, for that matter. 

“How’s work?” Chris says into the lingering silence. 

Mark shrugs and grunts; it’s like they’re back at Harvard, except he’s even less communicative and this time there’s no Eduardo to drag conversation from him. “Don’t you already know?” he finally mumbles. “Dustin can tell you as much as I can.”

Dustin doesn’t even have to look at Chris to know that he’s rolling his eyes. “Not to get too trite, but I want to hear it from you.”

“S’ all the same,” Mark says, not looking up from his plate. 

Chris reaches across the table and stills Mark’s hand where he hasn’t stopped stirring his food without eating it. “It’s really not,” he says, voice just the right side of being a snap. 

When Mark looks up, his face is unreadable. It’s an improvement from surly, Dustin supposes, and Mark does answer Chris’s question. He speaks, rapid and clipped, about new developments at facebook, about the overwhelming stupidity of the people he deals with on a daily basis. 

“I miss getting to code,” Mark says, and Dustin sees Chris’s hand tighten where it’s wrapped around his wrist. 

He starts to speak, but Dustin isn’t listening. His eyes are fixed on Mark and Chris’s hands and his mind is fixed on stopping himself to reach out and stacking his hand on top of theirs. Dustin doesn’t really think he’s ever had an epiphany before, but maybe this is what Mark felt like when he realized what facebook could be—like all the pieces of something that was almost there but not quite have settled into place and he knows exactly what he needs to do. 

Or what he wants to do, at least. 

The thing is, no one ever prepared him for the possibility that he might be in love with more than one person at the same time. 

He watched movies as a kid—and as a teenager and as an adult—and learned all these things about what it was like to love someone; about nerves and desperately wanting them like you and tingly feelings of happiness any time you touch accidentally. 

Then he got a bit older and he experienced them for real, with all the crushes whose names he’s now forgotten, and then all over again with Chris. 

And his parents were open-minded enough, and he’s glad about that, because, well, _Chris_. And there were love triangles, sometimes, people forced to choose between two people they loved equally. 

But no one ever bothered to mention that maybe being in love with two people didn’t necessarily mean it had to be a choice. 

Or maybe it does have to be a choice. 

 

Over the next week, Dustin keeps finding himself just _watching_ , trying to parse out every second of Mark and Chris’s interaction, half convinced he’s just seeing what he wants to see but also kind of too desperate to keep from hoping. 

Right now, they’re arguing good-naturedly, Chris cooking and Mark sitting at the kitchen table, being, as usual, completely useless. Chris tosses a carrot at the back of his head, which makes a quiet noise when it makes contact. “Make yourself useful,” he says, “and go get the vinegar out of the cabinet, please.” 

“Can’t Dustin do it?” Mark whines. 

“I like him better,” Chris answers, and Mark stands up, his frown barely holding. 

Dustin keeps trying to figure it out, who he’d pick if he had to, but he keeps coming back to the same things. Chris makes him want to be a better person, Mark makes him want to be smarter person (and Eduardo makes him want to be nicer, but that’s—kind of moot, at this point). 

He just wants both of them. 

And no one ever bothered to tell him that _that_ was even an option. 

His thoughts must make him uncharacteristically quiet, because Chris is watching him with concerned eyes and cocking his head inquisitively. When Dustin stands up to get a glass of water (and snag some of the carrots), Chris presses close to him and whispers, “Hey, are you okay?”

Dustin forces himself not to glance over at Mark before he replies. “I’m good but, uh, can we talk later?”

“Sure,” Chris says with a quick smile. 

It weighs on Dustin, though, the threat of having to sit down and look Chris in the eye and say—something. He could tell the truth (because telling the truth is always a good thing, except when it isn’t), but there’s just so much at stake. At least things are easy between the three of them again, even if making eye contact with Mark isn’t always the most pleasant thing. 

He thinks Mark might miss him, too. For whatever reason. 

Dustin stays quiet for the rest of the night, looking and thinking and forcing himself not to down glass after glass of wine. If there was ever a conversation he needed to have a clear head for, this is definitely it. So he sips at the glass of wine Chris pours him, and ignores the feeling of Mark’s eyes drilling into his skull, angry or concerned or maybe just bored; Dustin doesn’t know, because he hasn’t dared to look at him since before dinner started to look less like piles of vegetables and more like food. 

Eventually, Mark downs the rest of his glass of water and excuses himself for a few minutes. But even now that he and Chris are alone, if only temporarily, Dustin’s reluctant to start the conversation now, preferring to just sit in not-quite-comfortable silence, watching Chris and navel-gazing. 

So, predictably, Chris is the first of them to speak. 

“Dustin,” he says, voice soft but steady, “Is this about Mark?”

And Dustin, because he may be a coward but he’s not a liar and he’s _absolutely_ not a liar to Chris, nods, unable to really find the words he needs to explain it properly. 

“It’s, uh,” he begins, but there’s not anywhere he’s ready to let that sentence go. The worst case scenario—the possible outcome so horrifyingly bad that thinking about it makes his stomach hurt a little bit—is losing Chris _and_ Mark, fucking things up with Chris and then turning to Mark and finding—nothing. 

He’s not stupid enough to think that it’s not a possibility. 

“I know you two were sleeping together,” Chris continues. “I’m not blind.”

“Oh,” Dustin says, because he kind of hadn’t wanted Chris to know, in a stupid way that’s, well, it’s stupid and it makes no sense, especially given—everything. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

Chris’s voice shakes the slightest bit when he speaks. “Would you rather be with him?”

“No,” Dustin says, the denial almost automatic, “No, never.” He swallows hard and continues speaking. “If I had to choose, I would choose you.”

“But,” Chris says slowly, the word trailing off into nothing.

“I don’t want to choose,” Dustin whispers. Actually saying it is simultaneously the most relieving and most terrifying thing he’s ever done. He clenches his fists to try and stop his hands from shaking, but his heart’s still pounding and he’s actually so nervous he feels sick to his stomach. 

Chris doesn’t answer immediately, which doesn’t do anything to decrease Dustin’s anxiety level. 

Finally—it feels like it’s been a year, and Dustin’s pretty sure he’s aged three—Chris says, “What do you want to do about it?” He looks a little shaken, maybe, and Dustin can tell from the tension in his arms and shoulders that he’s not as calm as he wants to seem, but he doesn’t seem _angry_ , which is a pretty big relief. 

“I don’t really know,” Dustin says, because the truth is the easiest thing to remember. “The ball’s kind of in your court.”

Reaching across the table, Chris grabs Dustin’s hand and runs a thumb across his knuckles. 

“I think,” he says slowly, biting his lip. “I think that we ought to talk to Mark.”

It’s an answer that takes Dustin aback. He’s fairly certain that he’s just gaping at Chris, his mouth slack and his eyes wide. “Do you …” he starts to say, despite not being entirely sure what question he’s asking or what answer he wants to hear. The idea of Chris having feelings for Mark makes his stomach twist, half excitement and half jealousy. 

“It’s not just you,” Chris confirms.

Okay then. Dustin can work with that, he thinks. 

 

Naturally, Dustin has no idea how to approach the conversation with Mark, and spends most of the evening hoping that Chris will take the initiative. After Mark wanders back in, half distracted (probably thinking about facebook), the three of them pile into the living room and Dustin snatches the remote before Chris can find some horrifically depressing movie about the deep sadness of life or whatever. He puts on some sitcom that his parents probably watched when he was a kid, then carefully places the remote where Chris would have to lunge across Mark, who’s seated himself between them. 

Well, it was more like Mark sat down on in the middle the couch and then Chris and Dustin settled on either side of him. Chris has an arm across the back of the sofa, his fingers trailing lightly on Dustin’s shoulder. Mark seems vaguely uncomfortable; he’s staring too hard at the TV and not letting his eyes move away from it, even when Chris’s fingers drift across the back of his neck. 

Chris is persistent, though—years of Mark-wrangling have clearly taught him the best way to drag him from his shell—and a few minutes later, Dustin feels him move his hand over to rest on Mark’s shoulder. Mark doesn’t turn towards him, but he flinches just a tiny bit. Behind him, Dustin catches Chris’s eye.

“Seriously?” he mouths. 

“You okay with it?” Chris mouths back. At least, Dustin hopes that’s what he mouthed, because otherwise things might get strange. 

Dustin goes for it; his lip-reading skills are passable. “I am if you are,” he mouths, nodding and moving his own arm to rest a hand on Mark’s back. 

Finally, Mark looks away from the TV, turning to Chris and then to Dustin. He looks—confused, maybe. His mouth is twisted and he doesn’t hold eye contact, just glances and looks away. Dustin rubs his hand softly against the worn fabric of Mark’s t-shirt, and hopes desperately that Chris will say something so that he doesn’t have to. Even though it would probably be less awkward if he did, because of—well, of history. And such. 

“Mark?” Chris says softly. Probably because it’s become clear that Dustin isn’t going to take the initiative. 

“Um,” Mark says. 

“Do you want to do this?” Chris continues, attempting to hold Mark’s eyes but not really succeeding. Dustin can feel himself biting his lip even though he doesn’t remember doing it; Mark’s doing the same thing, his face scrunched and funny-looking. 

Mark nods, just once and without meeting either of their eyes. 

As much as Dustin wants to curl his hands into Mark’s hair and press their mouths together, he resists momentarily. “Are you sure?” he asks, willing Mark to actually make eye contact with him. “I want to do this. Do you?”

“I don’t want to be in the middle of something, or…” Mark mumbles, trailing off and shrinking away from their hands a little bit. 

Dustin remembers when he wouldn’t have worried about that at all, and it’s weird to see this new and sometimes improved Mark who second-guesses people so much more. He’s never felt protective of Mark before, like it never occurred to him that Mark could be broken—but in hindsight, he thinks, tightening his grip so that Mark can’t slouch and slide out of it, it’s kind of the most obvious thing. 

“It’s not like that,” Dustin hears Chris say, so close to Mark’s ear that he barely makes it out. 

“Unless you want to be in the middle,” Dustin adds, just shy of glib. “Otherwise, I’m totally fine being there. Or Chris could be.”

“Okay,” Mark says, and this time he glances between them as he says it. 

Dustin takes the opportunity to actually curl his hand into the almost wispy curls at the back of Mark’s head, and he relishes the still-familiar indescribable sound that Mark makes in the back of his throat, like everything in the world instantly got less stressful. He watches Chris lean down and press a kiss to the side of Mark’s jaw and it feels like his world is spinning a little too fast. 

For a stupidly long moment, he wonders whether everything is coming together too easily, if this might be a dream or a fantasy or if maybe someone has just given him a lot of really good drugs. 

Then he feels a hand curl against his thigh and when he glances down, it’s not Chris’s clean, soft fingers, it’s Mark’s scraggly nails and rough-looking skin, and Dustin feels a little like he’s been hit by a truck. 

Well, if they’re going to do this, he doesn’t want to sit there dumbly and wait for it to happen. 

Leaning in slightly, Dustin pushes Mark’s chin until they’re facing each other and he can inch forward and kiss him. The kiss itself isn’t all that different from the ones they shared before—well, before Chris. But the knowledge that Chris is _right there_ , watching them, his hand still on Mark’s shoulder, that changes everything. Dustin presses his mouth harder against Mark’s, which opens slightly and he can feel a breathy gasp. 

All of a sudden, Mark’s pulling and Dustin chases after him momentarily, before he realizes that it’s because Chris has pressed his thumb to Mark’s cheek and is turning his head away from Dustin. And then he’s watching Chris kiss Mark, resting a hand lightly against his cheek. Mark’s hand on Dustin’s thigh tightens a little. 

It’s kind of an incredible thing to watch; he knew that Chris’s kisses were amazing because, hello, personal experience, but seeing how carefully he goes about kissing Mark is kind of incredible. At the risk of sounding like an incredible sap (which, who is he kidding, he totally is), it’s almost beautiful. Dustin reaches forward almost cautiously and rests his palm on Chris’s cheek. He can feel the muscles moving as Chris works his mouth against Mark’s. 

When his thumb slides down to touch where their mouths are meeting, Mark breaks the kiss almost as soon as Dustin feels the warmth of his lips, and sucks the thumb into his mouth. 

Dustin’s not really surprised by it, but, over Mark’s shoulder, he sees Chris’s eyes widen a little. Suddenly, Dustin wants nothing more than to be kissing both of them at the same time, which is all kinds of not possible. Unfortunately. But he’s got all night—and hopefully a lot of nights after that—to kiss them. 

So he decides, as usual, to settle on optimism, and press a string of quick kisses to the back of Mark’s neck. 

 

Dustin wakes up the following morning in a messy heap with Chris and Mark, still on the sofa. Mark’s hunched over one armrest, curled in on himself and asleep on his arm. Chris’s head is in his lap, and his legs are stretched out across the couch, somehow leaving room for Dustin to curl up around them. He’s dangerously close to falling off, though, and takes a moment to be grateful he woke up before he _did_ fall and crack his head on the coffee table. 

There’s no way he can wiggle out of their heap without waking Chris up, though—he’s not a very heavy sleeper to begin with, and they’re pressed together tightly, with Chris’s fingers curled against his skin. Besides, it’s warm and surprisingly comfortable, given that the three of them are squeezed onto a sofa that really isn’t that big. 

Briefly, he considers just going back to sleep—after all, sleep is always awesome and to be had in the largest quantities possible, regardless of any other things he could be doing. And seriously, there’s not very much he can do right now, at least not without waking Chris and Mark; the former of whom is generally sweet, if bleary-eyed, first thing in the morning, but the latter of whom is downright unpleasant and surly. Dustin’s spent a lot of time arranging to not deal with Surly Morning Mark, and actually being responsible for his appearance goes against everything he stands for. 

He’s trying to make sense of the surreality of it all, that he and Chris and Mark really are all strewn across each other and that last night really happened and that _this_ might be happening. 

There’s a strong possibility that he’s just dreaming, because there’s no way that—except that he’s not dreaming, because dreams don’t feel like this, solid and coherent and with all the necessary pieces there and no extra ones that don’t make sense mixed in with them. Besides, Chris is shifting, just a little, and it means he’s waking up. Dustin’s familiar with it, now (though the knowledge of that never fails to make him a little giddy). 

The first thing Chris does upon opening his eyes is blink repeatedly and rapidly, like he can’t quite make sense of everything; Dustin isn’t exactly in a position to blame him. 

“Hi,” he whispers, when Chris finally looks away from Mark and notices Dustin, half next to his legs and half on top of them. 

Chris smiles at him, eyes a little wider than usually, but generally happy-looking otherwise. That’ll do, Dustin thinks, biting back an undignified giggle when his brain nearly follows it with _pig_. “Do you want to get some breakfast?” Chris asks, and Dustin nods enthusiastically. 

He catches himself before they stumbled into the kitchen, though, and hisses, “Chris, _Chris_.”

“What?” Chris says, just loud enough to be heard. 

“I don’t think we should let Mark wake up alone,” Dustin says, because sometimes he understands people, at least a lot better than Chris gives him credit for. 

Chris just nods, a little briskly, and says, “Why don’t you stay in here and I’ll make some pancakes. You can play whatever that stupid thing on your phone is, I guess.”

“But I’ll miss you,” Dustin whines, relishing the fond way Chris rolls his eyes. Besides, he does humor him by stepping back into the living room and pressing a lingering kiss to Dustin’s lips before disappearing into the kitchen. 

Several rounds of iPhone Rock band later, Mark stirs, mostly just pressing himself closer to Dustin and squeezing his eyes closed. 

For all that Surly Morning Mark is a pain in the ass, he’s also kind of cute, with the not wanting to wake up and the refusals to even open his eyes and acknowledge that he’s no longer asleep. Dustin just grins, privately, and waits for Mark to concede defeat to the morning and the smell of pancakes drifting in from the kitchen. Once he does, it takes several more minutes for them to shuffle in, Dustin’s hand trailing up and down Mark’s t-shirt-covered back and Mark’s arm looped loosely around Dustin’s waist. 

When he sees them, Chris’s face goes a little soft—the way it used to, back at Harvard, when he would see Eduardo dragging Mark away from the computer and forcing him to sleep, or when Dustin would feign sleep as an excuse to rest his head on Chris’s lap. If Dustin were a gambling man, he would bet that Chris was making a pretty strong effort to just serve them breakfast instead of kissing them both stupid. 

They end up all three settled around the table, with no kissing having taken place, unfortunately. But it’s probably for the best since it’ll be less awkward this way, Dustin thinks as he spears a piece of pancake with his fork and considers the merits of putting syrup in Mark’s hair just to see his face contort. 

Everything still feels a little fragile, though, like maybe Mark isn’t quite sure what’s going on. Dustin knows what he wants from this morning—and tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and _a lot more mornings_ — but Mark’s not making eye contact with any of them and that worries him. 

Finally, after a long silence during which Mark contemplates his plate at length, and Chris and Dustin make vague gestures of confusion at each other, Chris reaches out to rest his hand on Mark’s arm. He’s always been better at getting through to Mark—more fluent in Zuckerbergese—than Dustin. 

“It wasn’t just last night,” Chris says, straightforward and open. “Unless you want it to be just that,” he adds, because he’s that kind of person. 

“Oh,” Mark says, swallowing visibly. “Okay.”

“Are you sure?” Chris says, comfortingly. “Because it’s okay if you don’t want this, or you need to think about it or—whatever.”

Mark’s blushing a little—it’s so endearing it actually hurts a little—when he answers. “I’m sure.”

Dustin tries not to grin, but he can’t resist holding his hand out to Mark and saying, “Pinkie promise?”

The eye roll he gets in response—so like Chris’s, sometimes—is predictable, but Mark hooks his pinkie around Dustin’s nonetheless. He, of course, takes the opportunity to pull Mark forward slightly, and kiss him soundly. 

“Good.” 

Chris is laughing on the other side of the table and mumbling something about how Mark really should have seen that coming. Mark doesn’t seem to mind too much, though, kissing Dustin back with syrup-sticky lips and smiling a little against his mouth. 

 

It’s vaguely worrying how little time it takes the three of them to settle into a comfortable routine—like, given that Dustin is as weird as he is, and Chris is a stubborn as he is, and Mark is as _Mark_ as he is, shouldn’t it take them more than a week and a half (give or take) to turn this _I like you AND you_ thing into something resembling a functional relationship? 

But it doesn’t. They settle in comfortably—Chris and Dustin are much as they always were, except that Mark is there more often, flopped across the couch or working on something at the kitchen table or sleeping spread-eagle and drooling in their bed. Dustin feels like some giant piece of his heart that was missing has been added back in, and, just, he’s pointedly not thinking about how there’s still some space left to be filled, because this is more than he could ever have hoped for. 

Chris drags Mark (and sometimes Dustin) out of bed at a semi-reasonable hour, most mornings, and in exchange, Dustin tries to drag Mark out of the office before anyone under the age of 70 has gone to sleep in their time zone. He doesn’t always succeed, mostly because _he’s_ not always home by then, but it’s a start. 

It’s weirdly familiar, the hours he’s, well, the hours he’s trying to avoid keeping, more like. Kind of like being back in college, frantic and overwhelming and glorious. 

Dustin remembers the beginning of facebook, working constantly and trying to squeeze in classes and assignments and the handful of friends he had who weren’t bending over backwards for Mark Zuckerberg around it. Mostly, sleep was what lost out, with other friends a close seconds. But still, he remembers doing nothing _but_ facebook, not quite to the extent Mark did, but still. He lived and breathed code for weeks on end, learning it as he went and mostly just trying not to fuck up so horribly that Mark would kill him in his sleep. 

Now, he’s trying to do that all over again, only he’s the crazy over-invested one instead of Mark, and he’s trying to do a full-time job at facebook on top of it, because they haven’t found a replacement for him yet. 

The combination feels a lot like insanity. 

Well, he could just quit facebook; he doesn’t need the money— _seriously_ —but he also doesn’t want to leave his job without there being someone lined up who can do it and do it well. It might be Mark’s baby, but Dustin was there, tearing his hair out over glitches in the code and obsessively tracking the number of users and hoping beyond hope that nothing would go horribly, irreparably wrong. He’s fucking _invested_. 

So no leaving yet, not until he finds someone who can wrangle the children as well as he can. 

He comes to this conclusion—explicitly, at least, he’d probably just assumed that leaving Mark to deal with that bit of the responsibility of facebook on his own was something he’d never do—after a late meeting with one of his own investors. And god, does it feel weird to be doing all these things, the ones that Mark (and Eduardo, and then Sean) always did, because he’s too young to be founding his second start-up, but there he is, having coffee with investors and talking about a business plan and it’s a little overwhelming, even after the insanity that was facebook. 

So Dustin’s a little fried, and a little caught up in his head, when he unlocks the door and wanders aimlessly into the living room. He expects to see Chris there, probably curled up with a book or a magazine or maybe his laptop, but figures that Mark will still be at the office. Without anyone there to nag him into leaving—or bribe him into it with the promise of sexual favors—there’s only limited incentive for him to stop working. After all, as previously mentioned, facebook is very much his baby. 

What he sees is something completely unexpected, if not at all unwelcome. 

Mark is straddling Chris on the couch, kissing him thoroughly. Chris has one hand curled around the back of his neck and the other arm wrapping around Mark’s back, both of them pressing them close together. Dustin can see Mark running his teeth against Chris’s lip and he can see when Chris swallows hard and he can _hear_ both of them groan when Mark shifts his hips a little bit. 

Something curls in his stomach, jealousy or arousal or a strange combination of the two. Dustin wants to be in between them, to be kissing Mark while Chris works down his back or maybe the other way around, and he also wants to keep watching them, to see Mark squirm desperately when Chris sucks at the skin below his ear or to see Chris’s hips stutter when Mark nips at his chest. 

Suddenly—stupidly, inexplicably—he thinks of Eduardo, can imagine him sitting on the other chair with his shirt just a little too unbuttoned and his eyes huge (huger than normal) and black with lust. 

It’s _not_ an unappealing image, as such. 

(Actually, it’s a pretty fucking appealing image.)

“Dustin,” Mark says, sounding a little choked, “Get your skinny ass over here.”

“Wait, no,” Chris says. “We should probably move this endeavor to a bed.”

If Dustin were able to make anything come out of his mouth other than an inarticulate whimper, he would try to defend the virtues of his ass, which he’s had several people tell him is quite nice, actually. But as it is, he really can’t. 

Chris manages to dislodge Mark from his lap and, once he’s standing, pushes Dustin toward the stairs—actually, pushes him into the wall next to the stairs, kissing him thoroughly and, well, groping his ass a little bit. “For what it’s worth,” he breathes against Dustin’s lips, “I’m quite fond of your ass.”

And then he, like the fucking tease he is, pulls away and fucking _prances_ up towards their bedroom, Mark trailing behind him. 

Dustin’s still leaning against the wall, a little dazed, when Mark calls down from the top of the stairs. “I thought you were quick on the uptake, but if you haven’t figured out that we want you upstairs, I may have to revise that opinion.”

It’s enough to jar him into motion, taking the stairs two at a time and nearly tackling Mark when he gets to the top. Dustin uses Mark’s slightly open mouth—in shock, probably—as an excuse to kiss him, licking into his mouth and following him when he stumbles back slightly. Chris laughs at that, his smile nearly audible as he says, “Are you two even going to make it to the bedroom?”

He _could_ stop kissing Mark to answer, though that doesn’t seem like a very palatable option at the moment—kissing Mark is really quite nice, and Dustin hasn’t gotten to do it nearly as much as he’d like to—so instead he just shrugs. Chris is probably rolling his eyes, but Dustin can’t find it in himself to care that much. 

Then Mark’s grabbing his wrists and dragging him towards the bedroom, pausing every so often to fiddle with Dustin’s belt, which he finally gets undone just at they get to the bed. Chris is already sprawled out on it, waiting somewhat patiently. 

Well, mostly just waiting. And _watching_. 

He’s not actually touching himself or anything, but Dustin can tell from the way his hand is clenched in the covers that he wants to be. Dustin wouldn’t mind climbing over him for a little well-intentioned torture, but Mark’s hands are tight in his shirt and he’s being dragged down on straddle Mark’s thighs. 

Everything understandably goes a little fuzzy for a little bit when Mark reaches up and palms Dustin through his jeans (which he would really be okay with not wearing anymore, but Mark’s hand is kind of in the way of taking them off, so) but when he gets himself under control, he realizes that Chris is kneeling next to him and working at getting his shirt off. 

They’re kind of balanced precariously by the edge of the bed, though, and Dustin’s not wild about the possibility of falling off and cracking his head, so he takes a deep breath and speaks. “Can we pause for a second and move to the middle of the bed?”

When Mark nods, Dustin climbs off the bed quickly and lets him crawl farther from the edge, where he goes up on his knees like Chris. They both smirk at him—strikingly similar for two people so different—and Dustin drops eagerly back onto the bed between them. Within moments, Mark is pressed against his back, sucking wet kisses down the back of Dustin’s neck and reaching his hands around to fumble with the button of his jeans. Chris kneels in front of Dustin and kisses him. 

Dustin’s never been in the middle of this before. It’s—it brings new meaning to the words _sensory overload_ , with Mark’s hands against his crotch and Chris’s trailing down his shirt; they stop kissing for a moment so that Chris can yank Dustin’s shirt over his head and then it’s skin on skin and Dustin really can’t see straight. He pulls his mouth away from Chris’s because lack of oxygen is becoming a serious issue, and starts fiddling with the buttons of Chris’s wrinkled shirt. 

Tearing his focus away from the buttons, which he’s successfully undone, he realizes that Mark has leaned forward over his shoulder and he and Chris are kissing. 

That’s just—Dustin’s pretty sure his brain shorted out a little bit. 

And then Mark is trying to work Dustin’s pants off, which isn’t going very well, and pressing distracting kisses down the side of his neck and trailing an even more distracting finger down his lower back towards his ass. In front of him, Chris is stripping himself (somewhere around number one on the list of Things Dustin Likes to Watch) and watching Mark and Dustin with lidded eyes. 

“Can I fuck you?” Mark asks, his voice hoarse and his lips brushing against Dustin’s ear when he speaks. 

Dustin kind of shudders and his cock twitches—Chris’s eyes flick towards it—so there’s really no point in saying no. Not that he would have said no anyway, but—whatever. Chris is still eying his crotch and, if it weren’t for the terrible angle, Dustin would have sworn that he was about to get a blowjob. 

Given how incredibly turned-on he already is, it’s probably for the best that Chris decides against it, instead scooting closing to Dustin to kiss him again. During the kiss, Dustin vaguely registers the soft click of a bottole of lube and feels Mark press a finger into him; then, after some moments, another. He reaches down, aiming to wrap a hand around Chris, but gets batted away. 

“Nuh-uh,” Chris says, a little hoarse. His hips twitch a little bit, though, and Dustin can tell that he _wants_ a handjob, even if he isn’t going to let Dustin give him one. Instead, he wraps his own hand around Dustin’s cock and starts to jerk him. At almost exactly the same time, he feels Mark press into him and not with fingers this time. 

If Dustin thought it was sensory overload before, then—just—yeah. He can’t even think in sentences anymore because there are just too many things happening all at once and he wants to be kissing Chris (and Mark, but that’s more difficult logistically given that Mark is behind him and also that his mouth is already occupied with Chris’s). He’s thrusting into Chris’s hand involuntarily, absolutely certain that he couldn’t stop the motion if he tried, and he can feel Mark mouthing wet kisses down the back of his neck. 

When he comes, it’s almost a surprise. The world goes white behind his eyes and he loses track of his surroundings for a moment. 

Coming back to himself, they’re all lying on the bed. He’s still pressed between Chris and Mark, who have clearly also come. Mark’s still breathing heavily, and though Chris looks calmer, it’s obvious even to Dustin’s slightly dazed mind that none of them is particularly keen on getting up. 

“Should we clean up?” Chris asks, his voice weak.

“Uh,” Mark answers, articulate as always. 

They end up falling asleep before any of them manages to acquire the energy to stand up. 

 

A few weeks later, Chris is out to dinner—specifically, he’s out to dinner with Eduardo, even though he told Dustin and Mark that he was meeting up with a friend of his from New York. Dustin knew he was lying, knows that he didn’t leave things on very good terms with most of his friends from New York. He also kind of understands why Chris lied, though, which provides a bit of comfort. Ish.

There’s no way that Mark would have handled it well. He’s still kind of—raw, maybe, about the whole Eduardo situation, and, well, Dustin and Eduardo haven’t spoken since the dilution. Dustin never lied—he doesn’t lie if he can possibly avoid it—which is why Chris didn’t tell him the truth; Dustin would have told Mark if Mark asked. And then Mark would have flipped out and it would have been a huge mess. 

So Dustin understands, but he also _knows_ exactly where Chris actually is, which leaves him sitting at the opposite end of the couch from Mark, not talking but not really watching the movie on the TV either. As far as he knows, Mark believed Chris’s story about being out his plans, and he doesn’t actually want to stress him out (more). 

But then, Eduardo was always _Mark’s_ best friend and doesn’t he kind of deserve to know about this? Like, Dustin’s positive that if he’d had some awful fight with Chris (or Mark, for that matter, or even Eduardo) and one of his other friends as having clandestine dinner with him, he’d want to know about it. 

Only there’s nothing he can do to change it and Mark is always just a wiry little ball of stress to begin with and Dustin mostly just doesn’t want to be the person responsible for breaking him or making him snap or whatever it is that makes him act the way he was during the depositions, like his soul was being crushed slowly by Eduardo’s abnormally large and very sad eyes. It was hard enough for Dustin to look at him, see how hurt he was, while trying to keep his head on straight and tell what happened. He doesn’t want to imagine what it was like for Mark to stare at Eduardo across that table in that awful bleak room for three days in a row. 

Mark’s still watching the movie, or rather, his eyes are still on the screen. Dustin would bet his movie collection (and also his job) that Mark’s paying as little attention to the movie as he is. At least pretending to watch is a good excuse not to talk. 

Eventually, the movie ends—and with it, Dustin’s best pretense for avoiding conversation. 

“I’m going to bed,” he says, not meeting Mark’s eyes. 

“Kay,” Mark says distractedly. 

“You should too,” Dustin adds, half out of habit. No matter the circumstances, the fact that Mark needs more sleep than he gets is a given. 

The only response he gets is a vague, noncommittal murmur, but as he’s crawling into bed a few minutes later, he hears Mark’s footsteps on the stairs. Dustin leaves the lamp on for him and closes his eyes, though he’s fairly certain that trying to sleep is an exercise in futility. 

And, as he often—well, sometimes—is, he’s right. More than an hour later, Mark has finally dozed off next to him, but Dustin’s eyes are basically stuck open. He’s trying not to toss and turn too much, because Mark’s asleep and ought to stay that way, so he’s mostly just thinking somewhat obsessively about what on earth Chris and Eduardo could be doing out together this late. 

Finally, he hears the door open. 

Dustin’s not sure whether or not he wants to call Chris on having been out with Eduardo—on the one hand, he does kind of want to know what happened, but on the other hand, he doesn’t really want to put Chris on the spot. 

Predictably, his curiosity wins out, and as soon as Chris has opened the bedroom door and greeted him softly, chiding him a little for staying up late, Dustin says, “Is Eduardo doing okay?”

Chris gapes at him for a few moments, obviously taken aback by the question, but, to his credit, he doesn’t lie. “He’s pretty good,” Chris says. After a moment, he continues. “I think he’s kind of lonely. In Singapore, I mean.”

“Oh,” Dustin says softly. 

“Yeah,” Chris says. “He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t seem to have any good friends there.” 

“Mark misses him,” Dustin replies, after a pause during which Mark made a strange snuffling noise and pressed his face into Dustin’s shoulder. 

“I know,” Chris tells him. 

Talking about Mark’s feelings feels safer to say that than to say the whole truth, which is that he misses Eduardo too. Besides, it’s more relevant that Mark does, somehow; maybe because Mark misses so few people. 

Except maybe it isn’t. 

Dustin’s been thinking about it tonight (and a little bit before tonight), about how easily all four of them functioned as a unit, but it seemed so nebulous and unattainable. Eduardo was on the other side of the world and besides that, it just seemed so insane. It’s like, if it’s just sex, that’s one thing, but are relationships like this something that people _do_? Chris hasn’t said anything and Mark certainly doesn’t care but Eduardo—Eduardo’s always had something to prove to the world. He cares what other people think and Dustin dived into this on the assumption that other people’s opinions don’t matter and—fuck it, it’s irrelevant. Eduardo’s not here and he’s not going to be. 

“Scooch over, Dustin,” he hears Chris say. 

“I can’t,” Dustin grumbles. “Mark’s pinning me down.” 

Through half-lidded eyes, Dustin watches Chris smile fondly and cross to the far side of the bed, settling in next to Mark. He reaches over and runs a hand softly down the back of Dustin’s neck, though, and speaks gently. “Try not to stay up all night thinking, okay?”

“Did you finally just admit that I think at all?” Dustin asks, teasing. “That might be a first.”

“You’re mixing me up with Mark,” Chris answers, almost painfully sincere. “You’re brilliant and you know it.” He rests his hand lightly on Dustin’s waist. “Now go to sleep.”

Dustin doesn’t sleep well, though. Luckily, he doesn’t toss and turn much, but he keeps waking up, his brain working at too many different things to really sleep properly. 

The thing is, he decides around 3 AM, it’s really not all that much crazier to be want to be with three people than it is to want to be with two. He wonders whether Mark and Chris have thought about it; while he’s almost positive that Mark has—the idea that Mark wasn’t ever in love with Eduardo is ludicrous—but Chris is harder to read, at least about things like this. 

He doesn’t remember ever seeing Chris look, not the way he used to catch Mark watching Eduardo, regular glances up from his computer to where Eduardo would be sleep on his bed, but then, he doesn’t remember Chris ever watching Mark either. And obviously, there was something going on there that Dustin hadn’t picked up on, because Chris is curled comfortably around Mark and sound asleep. 

The idea of saying something about maybe talking to Eduardo and, well, how the hell do you invite someone to join in whatever the hell this is? “Yo, Wardo, wanna come join in the ménage-a-trois?” doesn’t seem to have the right weightiness to it, especially given all their history and the giant train wreck that is his relationship with Mark. With Mark and Chris, everything seemed almost natural, like it was the inevitable conclusion of Dustin’s pining and Mark’s bitter jealousy and Chris’s sharp eyes catching everything between the three of them. 

But Eduardo? He’s kind of an unknown quantity in this. As far as Dustin knows, he’s just this missing fourth piece that none of them have ever had the guts to go after. To the best of his—admittedly somewhat tired, given that it’s the middle of the night—knowledge, none of them have so much as kissed Eduardo, much less done any of the things that Dustin may or may not have thought about a few (a lot of) times in college. 

And then Mark. 

Dustin’s starting to drift off; he can feel his eyes drooping and his body relaxing toward Mark, and things are pretty freaking good right now. He stops fighting sleep and focuses on the comforting weight of Mark’s body against his. 

When he wakes up the following morning, he’s still thinking about Eduardo. (Maybe he dreamed about him?) It’s not quite pining, not really, but there’s maybe a vague resemblance. 

He puts it out of his head, though; there’s nothing he can do and dwelling on missing someone he’s never going to get to have isn’t going to make things any better. Besides, it’s a weekend and Chris will probably cook them breakfast if Dustin looks at him with wide, pathetic, hungry eyes, or if Mark does that thing where he looks like he’s just going to tip over from drowsy hunger. 

 

 

 

Dustin’s been scheming, no big deal. Just a bit of devious plotting on the side, in his more-or-less-nonexistent spare time. 

He probably should’ve gotten a trench coat and some sunglasses, that’s how freaking devious and sly and spy-like he’s being. 

Okay, maybe not, because Mark would’ve decided he was crazy and Chris might have figured out what was going on; they did watch kind of a lot of bad spy movies at school, half-asleep and drinking beer and dozing on each other’s shoulder when the plot went dull. 

But the point is, Dustin has sneakily acquired some information he should probably never have had in his possession. It took work, too; none of the usual routes turned up anything—nothing relevant on facebook or to be found by hacking his email or any other computer-based thing. He had to work outside his comfort zone for this one, and Dustin, when he’s not busy feeling a little guilty about it, thinks he probably deserves some recognition for it. 

If Chris ever finds out where he got Eduardo’s phone number, though, Dustin’s thoroughly prepared to get scolded, and then have the concepts of boundaries, and or letting people do things on their own, and of understanding that not everyone approaches forgiveness in an open-hearted, Dustin-like manner. 

So Dustin is basically planning on making sure Chris never finds out that he acquired Eduardo’s phone number by snooping on Chris’s phone while he was sleeping. It’ll be better for everyone, really. 

It takes him a while to work up the courage to use it anyway. 

He waffles for a while between sending a text message—less pressure, easier for Eduardo to ignore, but also less personal—and actually calling him—harder to ignore, but he’ll actually get to hear his voice for the first time in years. In the end, Dustin settles on texting, because he doesn’t want to get the time difference wrong and wake him up. 

Of course, then he has to figure out what to say. 

Maybe he ought to start with an apology? Just clear the air right off the bat; _Hi, Eduardo. It’s Dustin. I just wanted to let you know that I really am sorry for_ —but what’s he sorry for? 

For letting Sean and Mark screw him over? He’s sorry that it happened, but apologizing for it feels wrong, because by the time he understood what was happening, there was no way he could stop it. The papers were drawn up and, more importantly, Mark’s mind was made up, and nothing Dustin said would have changed it. 

Is he sorry for not speaking up anyway? Well, he is but apologizing for that seems like more something he’d do to make himself feel better than to smooth things over with Eduardo. It’s like—a selfish apology, or something. 

Or maybe it’s for just totally _ditching_ Eduardo after everything blew up between him and Mark. He was probably lonely and uncomfortable at Harvard, and to this day Dustin doesn’t know if Eduardo and Chris were speaking at the time (but he suspects not). 

It all feels, like, a day late and a dollar short, as Chris’s mother would say. 

Briefly, he wishes he could ask Chris for input on what to say, but that’s just asking to get reamed out. Besides, given that he was all devious and plotty, confessing said devious plotting to Chris probably isn’t the best idea. 

Maybe texting was a bad idea, because there’s no conversation and he has to try and cram everything into a few words and make sure Eduardo gets the point—that Dustin _is_ sorry, for anything he ought to be sorry for, and that they should try to be friends or acquaintances or whatever Eduardo is comfortable with, because Dustin misses him. (And if Eduardo’s not comfortable with that, then they can just go back to never speaking and it’ll be okay.)

He googles the time difference with Singapore—sometimes they’re 13 hours ahead, and sometimes 12, but right now it’s 13—and tries to figure out a good time to call. For starters, they both need to be awake (he can stay awake, but Chris might ask questions), and Dustin needs to be alone, and he doesn’t want to catch Eduardo at work or in a meeting or something awkward like on a date. 

Finally, after agonizing over it for longer than he will ever admit, even under duress, he just picks up his phone and calls the number. It’s 9 o’clock on a Friday, which means it’s 10 in the morning on Saturday in Singapore. It seems like a reasonable time to call, at least. And Mark and Chris have gone to some—to some dinner or function or stupid thing, whatever. The point is that he’s alone in the house. 

“Hello?” Eduardo says on the other end, his voice still familiar—kind and open and every-so-slightly accented. 

“Hi,” Dustin says, before he can chicken out and just hang up. 

“Who is this?” Eduardo says, slowly—like he thinks he probably knows but can’t believe the answer. Or maybe Dustin’s reading too much into it. 

“It’s Dustin—Moskovitz,” he says, adding the second bit after a beat and hoping that Eduardo won’t hang up on him, even though he’d probably deserve it and it’s a good thing that Eduardo learned to push back and— 

“Hi, Dustin,” he hears, and immediately lets out a breath he hadn’t noticed himself holding. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.” His voice sounds a little shaky, like he’s scared or doesn’t know what he’s doing or is worried this is all going to blow up in his face somehow. Probably because he’s all of those things. “But Chris could tell you that. He won’t say anything about you to us, though. How are _you_ doing?”

“I’ve been doing well, thanks,” Eduardo says, stiff and formal like he always got when he was uncomfortable, and it makes guilt curl in Dustin’s gut. 

“I,” he begins, stumbling over the words a little. “If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s okay. I won’t push it. I called because I’ve missed getting to talk to you, but it’s not something I want to force, either.”

He hears the hissing crackle of Eduardo sighing. 

“It’s fine, Dustin. I’ve missed getting to talk to you, too.” There’s a pause, during which Dustin hears some unidentifiable rustling, and then Eduardo continues. “I just don’t really know what to say. It’s been a long time.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Dustin says, the words a little garbled as they leave his mouth. He hadn’t really meant to just throw that out there, even if he does feel better for having said it. Well, what’s that saying? In for a penny, in for a pound, right. “I’m sorry for all the other stuff, too. I’m sorry I did everything that I did wrong, and I’m sorry that everything I couldn’t control happened at all. Mostly I’m sorry we were all shitty friends. You deserved better. ”

“I—Thank you,” Eduardo says, and he sounds a little wavery, like he might be slightly choked up; Dustin hopes to hell it’s because he’s moved, and not because remembering has brought him to tears. “It means a lot to hear you say that.”

There’s a brief silence, because Dustin feels like nothing he says now is going to carry the same weight as a grand apology for having been a rather terrible person, and (probably) because Eduardo needs a moment to compose himself. 

When Eduardo speaks again, it’s slow and measured. “I’m actually in California,” he says, and Dustin nearly falls off the couch in shock. There’s soft laughter coming from his phone, now, and Eduardo says, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Dustin replies, trying not to sound petulant. Or like he whacked his foot on the coffee table, which he kind of had, and it hurt a lot. 

“Are you sure?” Eduardo says, half laughing and half concerned. 

“Really,” Dustin grits out, thinking longingly of the ice in the freezer. 

Eduardo sounds a little skeptical, but does drop the subject. “Like I said, I’m in California and I guess—do you want to get lunch some day next week? It’ll probably be less weird to talk in person.”

“Yeah,” Dustin says, “Yeah, that would be nice. Except, can we make it dinner?”

“Uh, sure, I guess,” Eduardo says, sounding confused. 

Dustin massages his foot gingerly. “It’s easier for me to get away unobtrusively in the evening, because—of my job.” 

“Oh, right.” It feels a little hesitant, to Dustin’s untrained ear, like Eduardo wasn’t expecting to be reminded of Mark just then. 

“Sorry,” he says. 

“It’s fine. I just—forgot, for a minute. But does Wednesday work for you?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” Dustin’s stomach turns over a little at the idea of seeing Eduardo in person— _in a few days_ —but he’s pretty sure it’s a good flopping, the kind that means nervous anticipation, not, like, that he’s going to start puking or something. He hauls himself off the couch and into the kitchen, where he makes a mess of trying to put some ice on his foot and eventually just gives up and grabs a Diet Coke from the fridge to rest against it. Cold is cold, right? 

 

And then, like no time has passed—because that’s how it works when you’re a little nervous—it’s Wednesday and Dustin is concocting an excuse to go out to dinner and hoping that Chris doesn’t ask too many questions. Mark won’t care enough to ask too many questions; Dustin has no insecurities about their relationship, but he’s really just not the type to bother with trivialities like that. 

Nonetheless, Dustin feels a little guilty coasting by on Mark’s general disinterest in the day-to-day workings of anyone’s life (including his own), because this is pretty much the one time that Dustin would care who he was having dinner with. 

But maybe something good will eventually come of it. 

Maybe, if he fixes things with Eduardo, and figures out what’s going on, and helps smooth things over, then _Mark_ and Eduardo will fix things and it’ll be like it was before, except better. Because now they’re older and less stupidly selfish, and maybe Mark’s a little bit broken, but it makes him fit better with other people, because everyone’s a little bit broken, really. 

It’s a stupid thing to hope for, Dustin knows; stupid, and too optimistic. He should know better by now, but he kind of doesn’t. Or maybe he’s just an optimist. That’s not such a bad thing, really but—as Chris reminds him, occasionally, and as his mother used to tell him about once a week—it does come with a tendency to be disappointed. 

And with something like this, where the stakes are so high and everything is so loaded, Dustin knows that he ought to at least try to keep from getting his hopes up. It’s hard, though, when he gets to the restaurant on Wednesday night and sees Eduardo waiting for him, smiling broadly—it’s not the smile he used to give Mark in college, but it’s huge and contagious and wonderful nonetheless. 

“Hi,” he says, standing and extending his right arm when Dustin approaches. It’s both painfully polite and painfully familiar—Eduardo, standing on ceremony even when said ceremony is somehow not enough to encompass everything in their history. 

But right now, Dustin’s in the business of making sure Eduardo’s comfortable, so he grasps the presented hand and shakes it, like he’s meeting a business contact at an industry dinner. “Hey,” he says. “What brings you to this part of the world?”

Saying that feels like the horrid, vapid small talk he has to make at those dinners, and Dustin hates it a little bit because this is _Eduardo_ and can’t they just make things right? They don’t even seem that much older than they were in college—Eduardo’s hair is less ridiculous and he’s put on a few pounds, but they’re both still young. 

“I had some meetings with developers,” Eduardo says. “And I’m going to visit my parents while I’m on this continent.”

“That sounds nice,” Dustin says, and he means it. He doesn’t really miss Florida, but he does miss his parents, sometimes. It’s been a long time since he went home, even if Gainesville isn’t really home anymore. To derail his thoughts as much as anything, Dustin edges toward the hostess’s—stand? Podium? Thing. 

“Two?” she says, giving them an appraising look. Dustin’s used to it; it’s the one asking whether they’re friends or business acquaintances or dating. Given that he doesn’t even know the answer himself, he wryly wishes her luck as Eduardo confirms that, yes, it’s just the two of them. 

At first, they stick to slightly awkward small talk—how business is going for Eduardo in Singapore, Dustin’s new start-up, Chris’s nonprofit work—but the conversation drifts toward reminiscing. When Dustin makes a crack about how some of what he’s struggling with at the moment would be easier if he’d actually finished his econ degree, Eduardo laughs a little and his smile is almost fond. 

“Do you remember that awful intro lecture you ended up in spring semester of your freshman year?” Eduardo says. 

Dustin groans. “I couldn’t forget it if I tried. And believe me, I have.”

Eduardo’s answering laugh is a little mean, but in a fond way—which makes no sense but it’s the truth. “I told you not to take it,” he says. 

Grinning sheepishly, Dustin says, “You know I’m terrible at taking advice. Besides, it didn’t seem that bad at first!” Eduardo swats at him with a napkin and Dustin laughs. 

After that, it’s a lot easier. They reminisce comfortably, but Dustin’s careful not to bring up Mark. That limits their conversation a bit—a lot—but it’s worth the effort to watch Eduardo laugh, and the three of them got up to plenty of shenanigans while Mark was too busy being married to his computer to join them. 

It’s so easy that it almost takes Dustin aback. Avoiding Mark is difficult, sometimes, but nowhere near as bad as he feared. Somehow, with all the huge things that happened between them all, he managed to forget why they were even friends in the first place. 

Regardless, he remembers now, and when they get up to leave, Dustin doesn’t let Eduardo shake his hand again; instead, he draws him into a hug and says, low but sincere, “We should do this again.” 

“Definitely,” Eduardo replies, and his smile is open and true—and Dustin’s stomach tightens a little with a confusing combination of fear and anticipation and something that might be hope. 

The guilt doesn’t hit him until he pulls into the driveway, and then it’s there, like a weight on his shoulders , and he wonders if this is how Mark felt when he was deliberately not telling Chris and Dustin about the dilution of Eduardo’s shares. The guilt doesn’t let up when his next thought is that it probably isn’t, because Mark didn’t do guilt, back then. 

It stings, in a way, to acknowledge that side of Mark, but it’s not like Dustin can pretend it doesn’t exist. 

He keeps his mouth shut, though, mostly because he doesn’t even know how to begin that conversation. 

 

They do have dinner again, a few months later, and after the second time, Eduardo leans in like he wants to kiss Dustin when they’re saying good night. He catches himself, though, overcompensating and stumbling backwards on the sidewalk a little. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have even—you and Chris—”

“It’s okay,” Dustin replies, aiming for soothing but not entirely sure he hits the mark. 

“It’s really not,” Eduardo says, high and a little frantic. “You’re with him and I shouldn’t want to—I shouldn’t even _want_ to kiss you and I really _really_ shouldn’t act on it and—it’s selfish of me!”

“Eduardo,” Dustin says cautiously, “I should probably have told you this earlier because if anyone deserves to you it’s you, but anyway…” He trails off momentarily, unsure how blunt he ought to be about the truth. Finally, he just spits it out. “It’s not just me and Chris.”

“What?” Eduardo blinks at him. “Do you mean…?” He shakes his head and then speaks again. “With _Mark ___?”

“How did you—” Dustin starts to ask, but Eduardo talks over him. 

“Who else would it be? Other than me, Mark’s the only person that you’ve both really been close to.”

“That’s not true!” Dustin protests, but when he starts to think about it, it really kind of is. The other programmers were always his friends (and Mark’s) far more than they were Chris’s, even though they did get along, and Chris’s good friends drank too much French wine and talked too much about European politics and books Dustin had never heard of for him to be really comfortable with them. “Okay,” he concedes. “It’s kind of true.”

Eduardo just nods, silent and pensive. 

“Is it—is it okay, I guess?” Dustin says. 

“You don’t need my permission, Dustin,” Eduardo says, but he follows it up with, “But anything that makes you happy is really okay. So as long as you’re all happy, then I’m happy for you.”

“We miss you,” Dustin blurts out suddenly. 

“What?” Eduardo says, looking a little closer to scared then Dustin wishes he did. 

“No, god, Wardo, I didn’t mean it like that! I’m not trying to pressure you or manipulate you into anything! But I know I miss you, and Chris probably does, and Mark—well, Mark misses you more than either of us, probably. Not that he says anything about it.”

Running a hand across his face, Eduardo says, “Shit, Dustin, are we having this conversation? Because I’m not fucking doing it on the sidewalk. Come inside.”

A few minutes later, Dustin is settled a little stiffly on the sofa of Eduardo’s suite, sipping at a glass of water and _definitely_ not making eye contact with Eduardo—who, incidentally, is eyeing the minibar. 

“Are you seriously going to start doing shots just to talk to me about Mark?” Dustin says. 

“I’m considering it,” Eduardo answers dryly. He seems to dismiss the idea, though, because he flops down on the other end of the couch and glances over at Dustin. 

“So, we’re talking about Mark,” Dustin says. 

“Yeah,” Eduardo says. “I guess we are.”

“I—do you know where to start?” Dustin asks, “Because I have no idea.” 

“Me neither,” Eduardo says, but it’s with a slightly pained laugh. “Er, I guess, is he doing okay?”

Dustin nods. “He is,” he says quietly. “Chris and I try to look after him. We’re not as good as you were, though.”

“Let me guess, you get distracted and Chris gets frustrated.”

“Pretty much.” Dustin grins. After a beat, and some serious weighing of the possible consequences, he adds, “He really does miss you, though. He never says anything, because he’s Mark, but I can tell.” 

Eduardo slumps farther into the couch, and Dustin’s stomach twists. “I didn’t mean that as, like, emotional manipulation or anything. He deserves to miss you, dude.” 

“I know,” Eduardo says, but he still looks miserable. “It’s not that; it’s what I don’t want to miss him but I kind of do. Like, hating someone doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve stopped loving them.”

“Yeah.” He’s at a bit of a loss for a good answer, so Dustin just repeats himself. “Yeah.”

“Look,” Eduardo begins, biting his lip. “I’m not ready to see Mark yet. But maybe I could get coffee with you and Chris sometime.”

Dustin swallows a giggle. “Uh,” he says. “Chris doesn’t exactly know I’m here.”

“Oh?”

“Because I snuck your number out of his phone when he was sleeping,” he finishes, feeling sheepish; it seems like so much more of an invasion of Chris’s privacy—not to mention Eduardo’s—when he says it out loud. 

But Eduardo is laughing—huge, real, doubled over on himself—and a weight lifts off Dustin’s chest. “He’s going to yell at you _so much_ ,” he says, forcing the words out through his giggles. 

“I know,” Dustin groans. “I’m not going to get laid for weeks. Maybe I can just never tell him. Eduardo, can we just tell him that you called me because you missed me and wanted to have dinner?” He’s aware that he’s rambling, but the laughter and Eduardo’s smile have made him giddy. 

Eduardo snorts a little—like laughing on top of laughing was too much for him to handle with any pretense of dignity. “I’m not sure I want to risk being strung up next to you when he finds out.”

“Damn,” Dustin says, still giggling a little bit. 

“Remember that time,” Eduardo says, half a non-sequitur, “That we convinced—”

“Oh my god,” Dustin says—not squeals. He doesn’t squeal. Regardless of what Mark says. And what Chris has on video. “If it weren’t for facebook, that would definitely be the coolest thing I did in college.”

“Damn Mark Zuckerberg and his world-changing ideas,” Eduardo says, grinning so wide it looks almost painful. 

 

Dustin feels vaguely guilty, sometimes, for the fact that he didn’t actually seek Eduardo out to apologize or whatever; reconnecting with an old friend for the purpose of seducing him so that he can turn a threesome into a foursome feels a little sleazy. Or like something from a questionable porno. (Dustin makes a mental note to ask Chris what the French word for four is because “ménage-à-trois” sounds a lot classier than threesome.)

To be fair, sometimes Dustin thinks his life _is_ a questionable porno. Or just a really vivid, drawn-out fantasy that’s so explicitly dirty he should probably see a psychiatrist about it. 

He does fess up about the cell phone snooping—if not his ultimate goal—to Chris before the next time Eduardo is in California. 

“What the hell, Dustin?” Chris says, but he seems more amused than genuinely angry. 

“I just wanted to talk to Eduardo,” he answers. “I missed him.”

Chris’s face does something that Dustin’s seen it do a lot, but it’s usually directed at Mark. He’s never quite parsed what it means, but there’s a layer of it that’s _charmed_ , and a bit of _you’re such an idiot_ , and then he’s pretty sure a big chunk of it is just love. 

“You could have just told me,” he says. “I would have invited you along to dinner sometime.”

“I—oh. I thought maybe you didn’t want him to see me,” Dustin says weakly. “Because Mark warned me and because I _knew_ and—”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Dustin,” Chris tells him, and his voice is just as soothing as it’s always been. 

“Mark did, though,” he says, quiet. 

Chris looks slightly pained. “It’s not our job to sort that out for them, though. No matter how much easier everything would be if we did.”

“I just wish…” He trails off, because he’s not sure he can put what he wants into words without it being too real—and too achingly unachievable—for him to deal with it.

Nodding once, Chris says, “Me too.”

That’s the last time they ever mention it—any of it, that Mark and Eduardo will probably never be on speaking terms again, how desperately they wish things were different—for a long time. 

If nothing else, it’s taught Dustin to be a pessimist—Chris would call it being a realist, but sometimes Chris is a little too pretentious for his own good. Regardless of what you call it, Dustin’s learned not to get his hopes up, because always hoping and never having those hopes come to fruition hurts too much. So every time Eduardo crosses his mind, he reminds himself that it’s impossible, that it’ll be a miracle if Mark and Eduardo ever have a civil conversation again, much less, you know, _sex _.__

Not that Dustin’s not fond of the mental images of that, Eduardo’s big eyes and Mark’s mouth and the way they’d look with Mark straddling Eduardo’s thighs—a lot like when he does it to Chris, except Eduardo is taller and Mark would have to lean up into it and—okay, now would be a good time to stop that train of thought. He shakes his head vehemently, trying to make the picture disappear.

It doesn’t work very well, of course, but luckily there’s no one around to see.

The first time, anyway.

As it turns out, once he’s pictured it once, it gets easier—a _lot_ easier, like, to the point where it’s just showing up in his brain randomly and at really inconvenient times.

Dustin has threesomes pretty much every time he has sex—not every time without fail or anything, but, like, a significantly higher percentage of the time than the average person does, he’s sure—and it’s good sex, too, so he really shouldn’t be fantasizing about his former friend who seems to like him again.

But none of that changes the fact that he _is_.

He finally lets it slip to Chris—everything, like some really fucked-up confession—on their way home from a dinner with Eduardo. Chris is driving, and Dustin, well, he isn’t drunk, as such, but he’s not really sober either.

“Do you ever think about Eduardo?” Dustin says, and Chris gives him a strange, baffled look. It takes him a moment to realize that he should probably clarify, because _thinking about Eduardo_ could mean a lot of things, and obviously Chris thinks about him sometimes, just not necessarily _like that_.

“I mean like,” he begins, trying to think of a way to put it that isn’t so crass it’ll make Chris hit him or threaten to deny him sex, “I don’t know, that maybe he could be part of this?”

It sounds ridiculous when he says it out loud; Dustin hadn’t realized quite how incredibly absurd a hope it was until Chris was looking at him, wide-eyed and a little sad. “I try not to,” he says.

“Oh. Me too.” Dustin bites his lip—chews on it, more like, it’s going to be raw tomorrow. “We should talk to him anyway.”

Chris quirks his head a little, considering.

“I miss him, Chris,” he says. “And Mark misses him and you miss him, and he misses us, too. Even if he doesn’t want to have sex with us or whatever, shouldn’t we at least try to fix things so that everyone is happier?”

“I can’t really argue with that logic,” Chris says, laughing a little. 

It turns out, though, that Eduardo is surprisingly open to the idea of talking to Mark. He doesn’t seem wildly enthused by it, but he does volunteer, after the first time that Dustin slips up and mentions him. (Chris had kicked him under the table for it, too, which he thinks was thoroughly undeserved, given Eduardo’s reaction.)

“Ow!” he says, louder than he meant to.

Eduardo bursts out laughing and catches Chris’s eye. “It’s not that big a deal, really.” Chris looks at him a little dubiously, though, until he continues. “Maybe I should talk to him.”

Dustin feels his mouth drop open, and he’s too busy staring at Eduardo, trying to figure out whether or not he imagined Dustin saying that to glance over at Chris and catalog his facial expression.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Chris asks, reaching across the table to touch Eduardo’s arm. It seems a little too intimate, or it would if Dustin didn’t know what everything is building up to—well, he doesn’t know, specifically, but he hopes, and it doesn’t seem like the hope is entirely unfounded, given everything that’s happened, and the look on Eduardo’s face and just—he _hopes_.

Eduardo shrugs. “I want to do it. I’m not making any promises of us being friends or anything but he—he seems like he’s grown up a bit.”

“He has,” Chris says, smiling, fond and a little nostalgic.

 

It’s not easy to build up to actually having Mark and Eduardo sit down together, if only because neither of them is exactly sure how to go about _telling_ Mark that Eduardo wants to see him—it’s obviously going to be a delicate balance of letting him know that contact might take place and not getting his hopes up, not making him think that he’s forgiven already. Dustin has no idea how to find that middle ground and, if he had to venture a guess, Chris is reluctant to bring it up because he knows, probably better than anyone, how fragile Mark is on this subject.

But just doing it is the only way to do it.

(Momentarily, he’s glad he didn’t say that out loud, and not only because he’s facing his computer and everyone would think he was even weirder than they already do.)

Mark’s been acting weird recently, on top of the fact that he and Chris are being strange—okay, it’s probably _because_ he and Chris are being secretive and unsure and talking to each other. Dustin knows that he’s just not sure how to be around Mark sometimes, because the urge to just blurt out to him that Eduardo is a _possibility_ is so strong that it hurts.

He knows that getting that hope and then having it taken away might actually break Mark, though. The lawsuit came close—he remembers Mark’s dead eyes and painfully long work hours and the way he never wanted to see anyone—but he made it through, sure, a little more fragile and insecure and closed-off, but still effectively Mark. It still shows that he misses Eduardo, though, and Dustin doesn’t have the heart to offer him everything he wants and then rip it away when (if) it turns out that Eduardo’s not ready to forgive him.

And maybe he’s picking up pessimism from Chris, but Dustin really doesn’t anticipate Eduardo actually forgiving Mark. Mostly, he just hopes that they won’t kill each other.

It makes his stomach hurt a little bit, from longing and fear and desperate, _desperate_ hope.

They pull it off, though—well, mostly Chris does—a conversation with Mark that makes it clear what Eduardo said, and how much of a promise it wasn’t. Dustin can see the hope in his eyes, even after that bleak, honest breakdown of how unlikely it is that Eduardo will ever be able to forgive him.

Afterward, Mark is sitting on the couch with an expression on his face that Dustin recognizes from the depositions—it’s not quite as bleak as it was then, but definitely in the same family—and he feels a twinge of something akin to jealousy: _he’s_ never made Mark look that anguished, not the way Eduardo does without even knowing it. Dustin forces that away, though. He’s the one that gets to sleep with Mark draped across him and clinging in ways he never would while awake. Swallowing hard, he drops onto the sofa next to Mark and wraps an arm around Mark’s narrow shoulders.

Mark doesn’t quite crumble under the touch, but it’s a very close thing. He kind of—slumps into Dustin, who takes advantage of the situation by playing with the curls at the nape of Mark’s neck, which he won’t usually let them do, despite how fun it is let them wrap around his fingers.

“Go away, Dustin,” Mark says weakly, but he doesn’t make any sort of physical protest against his presence, and Dustin rolls his eyes internally.

“You looked like you needed a hug,” he answers, and—predictably—Mark ignores him. He’s probably thinking something painfully clichéd about how he’s never needed a hug in his life, Dustin knows; he has to bite back a giggle at the thought, especially given that Mark’s needed hugs every day, maybe twice a day, for as long as Dustin’s known him.

“It’s what you do for people you love,” he continues, pressing a quick kiss to Mark’s temple and then pulling away in time to see Mark’s expression change as the words sink in.

He doesn’t say anything, no reaction, no response, not that Dustin really anticipated one. The only change he sees in Mark after spelling his feelings is that he slumps a little farther, like he’s accepted that he’s going to be hugged and there’s nothing he can do about it. Dustin twists so that he can wrap his other arm around Mark, and they just sit that way for a while.

Over Mark’s shoulder, at some point, Dustin notices Chris watching them silently. He gestures for Dustin to keep quiet and, after the moment of feeling like they just did a good-cop-bad-cop routine on Mark, he’s comforted to think about how this thing they have means that he still has someone to turn to after a fight. It’s a nice feeling.

Eventually, Chris does come over and join them on the couch, where they all curl up and watch a movie, like the most horrifically boring, domestic people Dustin has ever met.

He kind of loves it.

Of course, the end up having to plan out what’s going to happen with Mark and Eduardo over the next few days, which means Chris is constantly worried (ergo, Chris is constantly on edge and punchy) and that Dustin is just tense and hyperactively jittery. The fact that they’re trying to keep Mark from seeing just how worried they are isn’t helping; he’s clearly a little freaked, after all, the last time he saw Eduardo outside of a deposition room where they were surrounded by lawyers, he engaged in some pretty serious destruction of property. And on top of all that, Dustin strongly suspects that he, desperately wants Eduardo back in his life and isn’t quite sure how to go about that.

Part of him wants to help, but then he remembers the look on Eduardo’s face when Dustin apologized, and the look on his face when he threw the laptop, and he may not be Chris, but he knows that the only way this can be fixed is for Mark to do it himself.

And that’s how all four of them end up in their living room—Eduardo had sworn up and down that it was okay, that he didn’t need “neutral ground,” as Chris kept calling it, that it would probably go more smoothly if Mark weren’t totally off-balance, because they know how Mark reacts to being out of his comfort zone. Mark is at one end of the couch, and Eduardo is in the chair closest to him, and they’re not talking at all. Chris and Dustin are standing in the doorway, trying to be inconspicuous but also reluctant to leave.

After what feels like several minutes of incredibly awkward silence (it might be less; the passage of time is hard to gauge when you’re that uncomfortable), Mark gets up and says, “I’m going to get a class of water. If you come with me, I can get you something as well.”

It’s a transparent plot to get away from Chris and Dustin, but Eduardo nods quickly and answers, “Sure, okay.”

Chris catches Eduardo’s eye as he and Mark stand and move toward the kitchen.

“Do you want to do this privately?” he says, because he was clearly born to cockblock Dustin’s nosiness.

Eduardo looks slightly uncomfortable, and he can’t tell how Mark looks because Mark’s face is glued to the carpet. “That might be good. I—I don’t want you two getting dragged through it.”

Dustin smiles a little thinly. “It’s not that we don’t deserve it.”

“No,” Eduardo says. “You didn’t—” He cuts off and looks at Mark, who’s making very good eye contact—with the floor.

“Are you two even going to be able to talk to each other?” Chris asks, a little snappish, but his eyes are still fond. Mark’s eyes snap up to his face faster than Dustin’s ever seen them move when he’s not coding.

“I can do this, Chris,” he says, and Dustin’s a little bowled over by how _determined_ he is. He and Eduardo head into the kitchen, and after a moment, Dustin can hear the rustling of someone—hopefully Mark—getting them drinks.

Chris and Dustin, for their part, retreat to the living room, at first. They’re curled up on the couch, Chris reading and Dustin pretending to read but really just playing with the fingers of Chris’s left hand nervously.

It’s not long before the living room isn’t far enough away, though; they’re beginning to be able to hear bits and pieces of the conversation, and it’s not particularly pretty. Not that Dustin really expected it to go smoothly, but still.

"What do you want me to say, Eduardo? Because I have no freaking clue!"

"I don't know, Mark. Maybe that you're sorry, have you thought of that?"

"It was the right thing to do for Facebook!"

"That doesn't make lying to my face about it right!"

Chris flinches, grimacing. Dustin understands, really. Both Mark and Eduardo are being cuttingly precise in their accusations; it's got to hurt them, if only because listening is hurting _him_ a bit.

He can almost hear Mark tensing up, going stiff the way he does when someone else points out to him exactly how he’s wrong. Avoiding Chris’s eyes, because he doesn’t want to have to think about how culpable he is—they are—Dustin stops playing with Chris’s fingers and just twines their hands together.

After a long silence, during which they can hear Mark and Eduardo’s voices, but nothing distinct enough to be understandable, Dustin speaks. “Do you think this’ll help?”

In response, Chris smiles at him. “Yeah,” he says, “I think it will.”

“Eduardo!” Dustin hears. “ _Eduardo!_ You’re right, I shouldn’t have lied.”

There’s dead silence in the kitchen, and in the living room too. He can feel Chris squeezing his hand tight—too tight, it’s starting to hurt—and he’s imagining the look on Eduardo’s face and hearing Mark admit his own fallibility.

“Maybe we should leave them alone,” Chris whispers, and Dustin nods. As quietly as possible, they head upstairs; Dustin skips the slightly squeaky stair and Chris rolls his eyes a little.

Flopped on the bed, Dustin ends up falling asleep while Chris reads next to him, carding his free hand through Dustin’s hair.

 

When he wakes up again, Chris is still next to him, still reading, but he’s a lot deeper into the book than he was when Dustin fell asleep. There’s a tentative knock on the door and that’s when Dustin realizes it must be what woke him.

“Dustin’s sleeping,” Chris calls, as softly as he can while still being heard through the door.

A little drowsy, Dustin tugs at his shirt. “I’m awake.”

“Never mind,” Chris calls again. “He’s awake.”

The door swings open to reveal Mark, looking a little shaken but otherwise pretty normal. 

“Hey,” Chris says softly, the tone of his voice comforting in a way that Dustin is intimately familiar with. 

“Hi,” Mark answers. Dustin cranes his neck up and sees him gnawing at his lower lip. 

“Is everything okay?” Chris asks. 

Mark doesn’t leave the doorway, just stands there avoiding eye contact with either of them. Of course, Chris doesn’t push him because he’s not like that; Dustin might if he weren’t still a little drowsy, but opening his mouth still seems like too much work, so he just watches. 

“I’m in love with Eduardo,” Mark blurts out into the silence. 

“Knew that already,” Dustin mumbles. Mark probably can’t hear, but still. Worth mentioning.

“Come sit down,” Chris says, actually loud enough for Mark to hear. “You’re—not the only one.”

Once Mark is settled on the bed, next to Chris, he speaks again. “I told him.” There’s a beat, and then he adds, “He said he needed a little while to think about it.”

“About _what_?” Dustin asks, his mouth a little fuzzy with sleep. 

“Um,” Mark says, “all of this?”

“Oh, right,” Dustin replies. 

No one says anything, then, until Mark breaks the silence—again—with a tentative question. “Was that okay?”

Chris, inappropriately but also wonderfully, laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “it was okay. But don’t make a habit of it.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t kill each other,” Dustin adds before the dozes off again. 

He wakes up in the same way—to a soft, hesitant knock. It’s pretty much deja vu when Eduardo comes and in, cautiously, says hi to them. 

“Come on in,” Chris says, as soon as the door is open. 

Eduardo lingers in the doorway, twisting his fingers anxiously and not meeting anyone’s eyes.

“Come on, Eduardo,” Dustin says. “I mean, if you want to.” He edges a little closer to Chris to make room on the bed, but it’ll be a tight fit regardless. Eduardo does manage to squeeze in next to him, though, and Dustin—Dustin feels a little like his heart might explode. He’s the Grinch, except he didn’t start out with a freakishly undersized heart, and being stuck between Eduardo and Chris, with Mark on Chris’s far side, is about the most comfortable he can remember being.

“Mark said your talk went okay,” Chris says. Dustin feels Eduardo’s head moving next to him, and twists a little so that he can just make out the nod. 

“Mark apologized,” Eduardo says, and then after a beat, he adds, “I apologized too.”

Dustin just hums, still a little too sleepy to really answer, but he’s glad nonetheless.

Silence lingers around them for a few minutes, Chris stroking the back of Mark’s head and Dustin slumping towards Eduardo’s shoulder, and then Eduardo speaks. “I used to think about—you know, about _this_ back at Harvard.”

Not quite able to process that, Dustin squeezes his eyes shut and swallows hard. Eduardo stumbles over his words a little, but continues speaking. “Never as a serious—thing—or whatever, but, like, sometimes I wondered if it was possible. Because we all just—I don’t know. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Dustin pulls himself upright. “Me too. I mean, not really, I didn’t let myself think about it. But the idea was there.”

On his other side, Mark and Chris aren’t saying anything, just kind of slumping into each other—more than anything, Dustin’s struck by how comfortable it looks, despite the addition of Eduardo to the pile of people on the bed. His fingers are twitching a little, like he ought to be holding Eduardo’s hand, or running his fingers down the back of his neck, or maybe letting them rest against the tiny strip of skin between his shirt and pants.

And Eduardo is sitting on the bed with the three of them, and he knows what they do, and he’s there anyway, and—unless Dustin is imagining things—he’s just scooted a little closer to Dustin, so their thighs are just barely brushing against each other.

It feels like—it feels like Eduardo is coming onto him, and with Chris next to him and Mark at the far edge of the bed, he has to know what that means, that it’s not just Dustin.

Eduardo’s hand is on his leg now, not gripping or rubbing or anything at all, just resting. He’s not quite sure what it means, because Eduardo was so reluctant, and pushing the matter is probably a bad idea, but he also can’t really think about anything else.

“Dustin,” he hears Eduardo say, almost too quietly to be audible.

“Yeah,” Dustin replies. His throat feels scratchy and his voice is a little hoarse with it.

“Is this what you normally do in bed?” Eduardo says, and it takes a moment for the words to sink in and then Dustin’s giggling. Next to him, Chris is pressing a hand over his mouth, a familiar sign that he’s trying not to laugh.

Mark cuts in from the far side. “Not really.”

“But you’re not usually here,” Dustin adds.

“What if I were usually here?” Eduardo asks, his voice cracking a little bit.

Dustin swallows hard. He knows that he ought to say something—after all, he should tell Eduardo that him usually being that would be good, awesome even—but the words aren’t coming.

Well, if he can’t say it—he finally moves his hand, the one that’s been dying to touch Eduardo, and loops it around the back of his neck, dragging him down for a kiss.

He’s never kissed Eduardo before, obviously, but it’s a lot like he expected it would be, soft lips and cautious touches. Dustin throws himself into it, though, because _god_ has he been waiting for this a long time. Pressing his lips hard against Eduardo’s, he lets his fingers wind into his hair and enjoys the soft gasp Eduardo makes when Dustin runs his tongue across his lower lip.

There’s a hand on his back, probably Chris’s, because Eduardo’s are tugging at his hips; it’s pushing under his shirt and Dustin can feel the nails against his skin, too light to be painful but just hard enough that he wants to arch into the touch. Eduardo’s pulling him away from Chris’s hand, though, and close into their kiss.

It’s a difficult choice to make, but eventually Dustin resolves it by wrapping an arm as tight around Eduardo’s waist as he can and yanking him forwards. Eduardo falls forward a bit, and Dustin flails a little to keep from overbalancing and crashing backward onto Chris.

They haven’t stopped kissing yet—not that Dustin’s complaining—and he gasps a little bit when Eduardo pulls away from his lips and presses a string of kisses down his jaw. When he turns his head to give Eduardo better access, he realizes that Mark has crawled over and his nearly in his lap. He grabs Dustin’s chin and kisses him firmly.

This kiss feels familiar—he’s kissed Mark so many times by now—but having Eduardo at his side shifts everything back into the realm of being new. If it weren’t all so comfortable—so arousing, if he’s honest—he would overheating, pressed between three other people and the headboard.

But—and Dustin is well aware of exactly how clichéd this thought is—it mostly just feels _right_.

And then Mark is pulling away from his mouth and crawling sideways to kiss Chris. Dustin’s pretty much used to seeing it by now—as used to watching _unbelievably hot kissing_ as anyone can be, anyway—but Eduardo inhales sharply. “ _Oh_ ,” he hisses.

Dustin turns back to grin at him lasciviously. “Yeah.”

Everything shifts so quickly after that that Dustin nearly misses it—it’s like he blinks and then Mark and Eduardo are next to him, kissing so hard that it looks like they’re trying to climb into each other’s skin. Chris tugs him forward firmly, until Dustin’s straddling his legs with his knees pressing deep into the mattress. The kiss, when Chris finally manages to pull him down, is _filthy_ , tongues and teeth and lips pressing everywhere—not just mouths but all around them as well. Dustin trails his mouth down the side of Chris’s neck, too sloppy to be a line of kisses but also just close-mouthed enough to avoid licking him.

In response, Chris groans a little, scraping his nails against Dustin’s back and pressing into the touch of his lips; his eyes, however, are fixed on Mark and Eduardo next to them.

Dustin’s are too, though, except when he can wrench them away to watch Chris’s face—his eyes are wide and dark, and his mouth is hanging open just slightly. Dustin had to stop kissing him just to watch his face, and it was more than worth it.

Mark and Eduardo, though, _god_.

Mark’s pretty much sitting in Eduardo’s lap, and has one hand buried in Eduardo’s hair, holding him close. The other is working the buttons of his shirt clumsily. Dustin considers reaching out to help him, but just watching is intoxicating. Eduardo’s eyes flicker shut every time Mark gets another button open and touches bare skin—and Mark clearly doesn’t want to stop, as he’s running his hand, spread wide, down Eduardo’s chest.

All of a sudden—like something in him has snapped, a feeling Dustin totally understands—Eduardo flips Mark over and pins him to the bed, rolling his hips almost viciously. Mark’s face goes completely slack for just a moment, and even when he comes back a bit, his eyes aren’t as sharp as they were.

Dustin’s so turned on by them that it _actually hurts_. He stifles a moan in Chris’s shoulder, and leans up a little to whisper in his ear “They’re really hot.” He also bites softly at Chris’s earlobe.

Chris makes a valiant attempt to ignore the bite—it would have worked if Dustin weren’t pressed to close against him that he felt the slight shudder—and says, with a knowing smile, “Of course they are.”

Things get progressively blurrier after that, slowly turning into a haze of hands and skin and mouths and Dustin pretty much rubbing off against anything he can reach because, Jesus Christ, how he’s supposed to watch Mark and Eduardo—or Mark and Chris, or Chris and Eduardo, or any of them and _him_ —without doing something to keep himself from going insane is beyond his understanding.

It’s actually a surprise to him when Chris nudges him away to take his shirt off and he realizes that Mark and Eduardo are both well on the way to being naked. No one has done Chris the same favor, though, and Dustin’s suddenly really interested in seeing him naked. He works at the buttons on his shirt quickly, his fingers practiced and confident, and Chris fumbles at Dustin’s jeans when Dustin tweaks his nipple.

“You’re easy,” he says, giggling a little.

“Shut up and do that again,” Chris retorts.

“Maybe.” Dustin grins up at him. “What’s in it for me?”

Chris smiles mysteriously. “I’m sure I can make it worth your while,” he says.

Dustin’s been doing this long enough to know that Chris can make good on that, so finishes with the shirt and, while he’s at it, gives Chris’s other nipple a quick bite. As he presses messy kisses to Chris’s chest, working his way down, Dustin listens to Mark and Eduardo. He can’t watch them, not with his mouth sealed to Chris’s skin, but the noises are enough. Mark is whimpering, occasionally—he doesn’t usually make a lot of noise, though, so it’s telling—and Eduardo is moaning, slightly choked and a lot turned on.

If he _had_ to make a guess—and a brief glance over at them confirms this—he would say that Mark was sucking Eduardo off.

Okay. That’s—that’s just _really_ not something Dustin was prepared to deal with.

He closes his eyes briefly, trying to get himself under control, and sucks lightly at the skin above Chris’s pants. And then—because no matter how much Chris may make him suffer for it later, teasing will always be fun—he runs a finger up the hard line of Chris’s cock under his pants, with just enough pressure to make him twitch.

Next to them, Eduardo makes a noise like he’s getting his brains sucked out of his dick.

Though, if Dustin’s experience with Mark’s blowjobs is anything to go by, he probably _is_.

He figures a little showing off is in order, anyway. Besides, if you can, why not? So Dustin undoes the button of Chris’s pants with his teeth, and yanks the zipper down with them as well. He slips his briefs down quickly—not with his teeth; some things just aren’t worth the effort—and licks around the head.

The soft noise Chris makes is exactly what he anticipated, but the one _Eduardo_ makes isn’t at all. Dustin glances up at him and his eyes are fixed, not on Mark, but on him. It’s unbelievably heady, meeting Eduardo’s eyes at this moment. And then Eduardo’s whole face goes kind of slack, and his body tenses, and Dustin can see Mark’s throat work, and the knowledge that Eduardo just came while watching him suck Chris off is—just, okay, Dustin’s mostly glad he doesn’t combust on the spot.

He does pull off of Chris, though, with a kind of slurping noise that’s a little embarrassing, but Chris pulls him up for a kiss and Dustin forgets it pretty much immediately. He feels the bed shift as Mark crawls toward him, and hears Eduardo breathing heavily, but his eyes are still closed as he lets himself fall into the kiss.

Mark's fingers brush lightly across his back as he curls into Chris. He's tempted to try and press toward Mark's touch as well, a familiar and comfortable moment of conflict. Having Eduardo's eyes on them makes everything different—more intense, but also more comfortable, maybe even righter, than it's been every other time.

They're not even doing anything fancy—it's not like he and Chris and Mark don't do wilder things than handjobs and blowjobs and frottage—but he'd clearly severely underestimated how much adding Eduardo in would change things.

Namely, how much hotter it would be.

There are probably a lot of meaningful emotion thoughts that Dustin ought to be having right now, but Chris has just wrapped a loose fist around his dick, which is just really fucking distracting. Maybe if Chris weren't deliberately jerking him a little too loose and a little too slow for him to actually come, or if Mark weren't basically groping his ass, or if Eduardo weren't watching them all with his eyes all huge and blacker and looking completely debauched.

But all those things are happening, and Dustin's absolutely positive that Mark's, like, rubbing himself off on the bed next to them because it's shifting rhythmically.

Which isn't a distracting thing _at all_.

On opposite day.

Somehow, between the noises that Mark is making and Chris being a fucking _tease_ , Dustin manages to actually get a hand around Chris's dick and—well, be as much of a tease as Chris is being to him. He trails his fingers around the head lightly, waiting for Chris to get frustrated enough to complain. It'll happen eventually.

The shaking of the bed speeds up a bit, like Mark's getting closer, and then Dustin hears Eduardo mumble something incoherent. He gets it on his second try, though. What he was going for was "Get up here, Mark."

Dustin's eyes are still closed, and he's making whimpering noises that are neither pathetic nor in any way resemble begging, but the bed shifts again as Mark crawls back to Eduardo. He cracks his eyes for a moment and sees Eduardo's hand slip down to wrap around Mark's dick.

After that, it's all over pretty quickly—Mark's always made the most incredible noises once you really get him going and, unsurprisingly, Eduardo turns out to be good at that. The fact that he looks like a god (and that Mark's been in love with him since he was nineteen) probably helps. And Dustin is really, _really_ fond of the noises.

Also of the face that Chris makes when you press a couple fingers loosely against his ass, not even trying for entry, just _pressing_. It's part arousal and part relief and part desperation.

It's also a nice step towards getting Chris to tighten his grip enough that Dustin can come. The face really doesn't hurt either, though.

Finally, Chris's whole body starts to go taught and arch toward Dustin, and the movements of his hand get erratic, almost twitchy, but at least he's gripping hard enough that Dustin's vision starts to blur a little bit. Everything is achingly familiar as his world narrows to just Chris, and he has to force himself to look over and remember Mark and Eduardo, collapsed on the bed and speaking softly. 

Just seeing them—Chris, familiar, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth slack, Mark and Eduardo slumped over each other—is enough to finally tip him over, and Dustin comes, collapsing on top of Chris. 

Drowsy already, but not so much so that he can’t move, Dustin inches along the bed until he’s curled against Mark’s back. He feels Chris’s arm reach around him and sees as his fingers twine with Eduardo’s. After that, it’s too hard to keep his eyes open, and he just lets his forehead rest against the back of Mark’s neck, and settles into the already-comfortable warmth.

This, he realizes in a surprising and stomach-dropping moment of optimism, might actually work.

Even the stomach-dropping isn’t enough to keep him awake, though, and he falls asleep inhaling the scent of Mark’s skin.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to laliandra for beta, hapakitsune (and also opheliahyde) for listening to me bitch and ramble and you don't even know what all, and to everyone who let me talk about this or quote them bits or was helpful and supportive! The title is from the Josh Ritter song "Lillian, Egypt," and the cut text is from Good Man, Right Moves, Still Beating, and Wolves, respectively (all by Josh Ritter). Basically, this fic is unofficially sponsored by a frightening amount of Josh Ritter.


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